


Wherewith to Sate Its Malice

by horsecrazy



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2018-11-30 11:40:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 41,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11462847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horsecrazy/pseuds/horsecrazy
Summary: It is the Autumn of Terror. Consulting detective Caroline Forbes must join forces with the world's most dangerous criminal to solve her most challenging case yet. Caroline as Sherlock; Klaus as Moriarty. The Sherlock AU tumblr peer pressured me into writing.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: So this is the Sherlock KC AU no one asked for until I started tossing headcanons around on tumblr, and now...here we are. I wasn't supposed to write this, but, alas, I'm weak.
> 
> There are too many references to the original canon to list them all; just know that the majority of the deductions are taken from ACD's stories. The descriptions of Scotland Yard's interior are actually based on the game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments for plot reasons. Also, obviously Inspector Lestrade did not head the Ripper investigation, considering the fact that he never existed. I will mention several of the detectives who were actually involved in the murder investigation, but for the most part the police force will be populated by ACD's inventions.
> 
> Caroline is the hardest character for me to write in a historical setting because her speech doesn't suit it nearly as well as the Originals'. But the point in writing an AU is to take the same characters we know and love, drop them off in another setting, and somehow manipulate everything so that they're still the characters we know and love. Caroline's diction is a part of that, so I've mostly preserved it; I hope that isn't too jarringly anachronistic.
> 
> All newspaper article excerpts/any document excerpts whatsoever are taken directly from real reports; I didn't write them.
> 
> This will be at least two parts, probably three, knowing my propensity for blathering on about Historical Eras That Give Jenn a Boner.
> 
> Tim cameo for Kirythestitchwitch. Enzo is dedicated to clonemaster-general.
> 
> Also, for some reason this site decided not to save a chunk of edits in the middle of this fic; I've gone back through it, and hopefully caught the things that for some reason weren't saved. If you find any typos, I sincerely apologise; I don't know why it did that. It was very odd; some passages had the changes I made to them, and yet other edits were missing from those same passages even though I saved at multiple points throughout the editing process. Anyway, eat my dick, FF.net
> 
> Title is from a Shelley poem called 'Queen Mab'.

_In 1892 London decided upon an extraordinarily wet spring, and the mud retired from its banks to holiday upon the streets. Man is given to melancholy in such weather, having no light save that which is bled from those anaemic clouds, when even those gay heralds of winter's demise have drooped sadly from their branches, and God, it seems, has overturned his palette in favour of mourning crepe. What thin offering the gas lights poke into the corners of his heart is no consolation when, having ventured one tremulous adventure above these canals which once might be classed as boulevards, it sinks with nary a blink once more beneath its waters._

_I have had some fortunate occasion to record the prior feats of a singular individual with whom you will have acquainted yourself earlier in these musings, and in now looking out into this mist of foam and flotsam, which the waters have carried from all corners of the world and deposited here in Belgravia, where it seems even I am not immune to these fits of common grief, I find myself compelled to elaborate upon one of the more remarkable events of His career._

_In dipping our pen into that biographical inkwell, we are compelled to add a few fleur-de-lis to even the most accomplished of men. And yet none are here required; He alone stands above the stage of man with its petty failures and mean human inconsistencies. He had, you will recall from former entries, no equal._

_However, in the fall of 1888, history, as so often it will, decided to blot onto the record of this Caesarean titan a single stain; a speck, and yet one dust mote may disable the entire eye, and so vanquish even a Cyclops._

_London was then in similar throes, a dreary Atlantis, toiling under its seas, and in divesting itself of one grey afternoon, immediately afterward donned another. In August there occurred a murder which put the gazettes on their tiptoes, and strained the throats of every paper lad and which, as with every London slaughter, irrespective of brutality, had the good grace to bury itself soon afterward, to make way for fresher scandals. You might say we perform a remarkable…slayed offhand in this city where crime is but a mere Tuesday._

_Let us wander back on patient tiptoes, then, and through what humble gifts of my pen I may have the pleasure of providing, peek from these pages into near pasts, and let the fogs close behind us, vanquishing every trace of the candle by which you make out this page, and the fireplace where those stoked coals melt December, ever hot on our heels, from your toes._

_At an hour such as this, when our narrative commences, you will find London one long avenue of fog. Figures are conjured from this mist; in its depths whole buildings are assembled and thrown up with haphazard glee: here you are surprised by a tenement, there a butcher's. The fog itself seems to speak when from out of its turmoil, unseen, there drift the sounds of hooves and men, and, turning, you are startled to find these apparitions suddenly within arm's reach. Man is never more surprised to find himself not alone than in streets such as these._

_But in turning again, in following the natural inclination of London to twist back on itself, to wind, not along the main boulevards, but through these grimy side alleys where indeed the mist is a sole companion, where the gas lights dare not a finger, and the coppers merely flash their lanterns, here you will find Him, dashingly (if I may venture such an aside) clad, and carelessly whistling. Here are the forgotten avenues, the respite of beggars and blackhearts, here the untouched corners, where the fog settles comfortably, unchallenged by sun or gas, here the rubbish, the refuse, the cast-offs which society has set adrift._

_Here all the gathering of all the hells which stalk this naked world, cloaking neither its calluses nor its vulnerabilities._

_Here, baying at His heels, everything which gathers in such alleys, in such fogs, and with that unstoppable force inertia, swells, swells, and will, with only that feeble wall humanity to hinder it, scatter into the morning._

_You may recall some amusing accounts which, pale beside His own, nevertheless offer some wonderment for smaller minds, and which centre round a name with which you perhaps have already acquainted yourself._

_Here is where he turns, then, from the alleys once more onto the streets, and once again into a little boulevard called Baker Street._

* * *

Outside, London is sleeping beneath the fog.

You can hear the tock tock tocking of the horses and somewhere the foghorn lowing, out over the waters to the ships which glide soundlessly to port on these muffled waves or founder out at sea, a mournful sort of seeking, the kind you send out in one human moment to a blind dumb world where no one cares to receive it.

She listens to the hissing of the gas light, and cocks her head.

Kol has stolen her freaking 'M' encyclopedia again, she realizes, standing with 'L' in hand.

She leaves him a note on the sofa: 'Either my perfectly organized bookshelf is put back to exacting alphabetical flawlessness by 3 o'clock this afternoon, or I take two body parts of my choice. GUESS WHICH.'

There's a clatter of boots on the stoop downstairs. She shelves the 'L', and stands listening for a moment to the fog, the horses, all these slow and lumbering wakings of the city. The boots have left the stoop, hurried away down the street, and then returned to pace beneath her window.

They do that sometimes.

They think, but it's only a girl, and stand for so long trying to decide whether to ring or fade back into the city.

She opens the window and sticks out her head.

The man below her window starts, looks up, takes off his hat.

Maybe twenty-seven, blonde, clean-shaven, young in the way that beggars are not, but dressed in a worn coat, and with patches on his pants, so, once prosperous, fallen: it's all she can tell from here; in the fog, in the flashes of hansoms which raise that distant thunder struggling up through so many layers of mist to reach her he is vanished at intervals and then reappears with that hat squashed in his hand, and his face awkwardly crumpled.

"Come upstairs. It's 221B," she says, and shuts the window again.

He's 26, near tears, a minor clerk, childless, intelligent but careless of it, as most 26-year-olds are.

Boys are always throwing away that sort of thing.

His face beneath the blonde curls, which the mist confused, as if underwater, is ridiculously handsome, but he's too timid to take advantage of it. "Miss Forbes, I'm dreadfully sorry to bother you at such an hour," he says, squeezing the hat.

"It's ok; I'm awake at three every morning," she replies, and sits him in a chair, and then draws up her own across from him, with the gas light behind her, so the full spluttering cone of it is thrown on his face.

"My fiancée, you see, she's disappeared."

He takes out a letter from his coat, creased several times, and, trembling, unfolds it so he can hand it across to her.

There's something.

This little niggling thread which winds all the way down into the depths of her and which in following she keeps losing, and losing again, but it's still there, tickling, throwing up sparks somewhere, saying to her no, no, keep going, there's something here, in the nervous throat above his muffler and the twitchy hands and all this humble surface gloss-

She takes the letter.

"Something isn't right. Her parents aren't very…amiable to the match, but we'd decided to marry anyway, and now suddenly she's gone abroad. And this note, as well, from my mother, who's been so supportive of us, and now suddenly- she says women these days have no hearts, and they won't hesitate to break another's. And Jane's letter- there was no return address, no identifying information, only this little note, it's all I have, I don't even know where she's gone, but she promises herself to me, she says not to worry, she'll be back soon, and we'll be married at once. Miss Forbes, can you tell from where it's been sent? Is it possible my mother knows something?" He sits back in his chair, rubbing one of his hands anxiously.

She carries both of the letters over to her work table, and flattening them out under the gas lamp, takes out her magnifying glass, and meanwhile she turns over that niggling, trembling something in her mind, touches it from every angle as she lifts and turns the papers and runs the glass over them, going back over his whole quivering figure, first in the fog, and then in the room, where all the little details of him are counted off one after another, the muffler, the worn coat, the young and timid face, the long-fingered hands, ink-stained, and that hat, wrung between them-

She turns over the mother's letter.

So.

The hat.

She shuts her eyes for a moment.

Tock tock tock from the horses and that long and mournful calling, into the fog, into the Thames, across all the haunted corners of desolate Whitechapel.

"Both the letters are from your mother," she says without opening her eyes. "She hired an actress to play your fiancée and then abandon you so that you'd see the only woman who'd ever love you is your mother, who's sick, probably consumptive, but she's always been controlling, and she was never going to let you marry and leave her, consumption or no consumption. And you're not who you say you are."

She opens her eyes and turns around.

His face has undergone this whole transformation.

He's sitting with one leg crossed over the other with such easy confidence, and there's this coiling, an animal thing, you can feel it, not just in him but in yourself, walking its premonitory fingers down your spine.

They look at one another for a moment.

She thinks: here's where you slink a little, you walk like there's something nesting inside you, something frothing, something even his self-assurance can quail before. You tell them: not just a girl. You tell them: it's not a slur to wear petticoats and walk softly, with a big parasol.

"In my anxiety, I forgot to introduce myself properly, so in all fairness, I haven't technically misrepresented myself." Even his voice has changed, and he is 100% aware of his own attractiveness, and how the dimples in either cheek go straight to your head, just for a minute, just until you straighten your shoulders, and you clasp your hands behind your back, and you put all twenty four years of carefully honed logic between yourself and this man who tells all the little evolutionary twists of you that still know how to scent a predator, he's not a man, not quite.

"The letters aren't yours. Are they even real?"

"Oh, quite," he says, leaning forward and steepling his fingers beneath his chin. "They belonged to a friend of mine. Recently departed. Terrible tragedy."

"Your hat," she says, and snatches it out of his hands. "Good quality, but battered, bought in a premium shop three years ago, so you had money, but you don't anymore, because no one who buys a hat like this doesn't replace it once it's in this kind of shape. Unbrushed, faded in several spots, but you still care enough about appearances to smear it with some ink, so you care about not having money anymore, you're not a drunk, then, maybe a gambler, except- it's a forgery. A good one. This hat was actually bought…three days ago?" He nods slightly, still smiling. "And manually aged. So you're not poor, but you wanted me to think you are, which means everything else about your appearance is probably carefully cultivated to lead me astray. So you're not a clerk, you don't have an overbearing mother, although you're probably childless, because you're an ass, and I want to have more faith in female kind, that it'd say nope, no thanks to procreating with you. Shhhjt," she says when he opens his mouth to comment. "Don't interrupt me." She brings the hat to her nose. "You don't have any pomade in your hair."

"Astute observation."

"But someone with pomade in their hair recently wore this. And you can only buy this scent from one shop, a high-end one where it's specially mixed for one specific customer."

She tosses the hat back to him. "You're Kol's brother, aren't you?"

His dimples go even deeper; he doesn't seem perturbed at all. "You are quick, aren't you?"

"No, Scotland Yard puts aside its tiny, much-lamented penis and ridiculously fragile ego to call in me, a mere woman, because I'm an idiot."

That doesn't perturb him either. He leans forward a little, clasping his hands on top of the hat he's caught one-handed, so nonchalantly she is almost completely certain he practices it in front of his mirror. "I thought it might be time for us to meet at last. You have been poking at my organization for months now. Thought I'd suss out the competition, so to speak. It seems you might not disappoint me after all."

"I'm glad," she snaps. "Last night I couldn't sleep, wondering if I might meet your standards."

He licks his lips a little and leans forward even more, looking at her in a way so you can feel it in every inch between them, something penetrating, something that touches all the parts of you that ice over first, the spine, the suddenly nerveless hands, wooden on her skirts.

There's this whole other presence in the room, like something precedes him. It's in all the buried parts of you that still quiver after the gaslights have been put out, and in your warm abode you feel some cold portent of the world Outside.

She picks up the cane leaning against the wall beside the door and tries to hit him in the face.

He grabs her by the wrist.

There's this brief struggle: it's usually over this fast, but it doesn't end like this, with the cane sailing out of her hands, and her face pressed into the wall so she can feel some pain, just enough to remind her she's been bested, but he doesn't hurt her, not quite, he presses her into the wall and puts his lips right against her ear, but he doesn't hurt her: that would be too easy. "Ah, ah, sweetheart; let's not be like that, hmm?" He tsks; she can feel his breath on her cheek. He smells damp; he's still a little slick from his walk. There's a faint lingering odor of soot in his hair, and, underneath that, his soap.

She doesn't struggle; he'd like that. Men like this: they want to watch you fight till all the hope goes out of you.

"This is my polite warning to keep your little nose out of my affairs. Now, I only grant one warning, so use it wisely. I'd hate for you to end up in the Thames. All that decomposition would do just terrible things to your complexion." She can feel him smile against her.

She reaches her hand back and grabs him by the testicles.

The trick is to squeeze and turn; it's just like a doorknob, except with more vomiting and tears.

She kneels down with him as he sinks to the floor, still holding him, her skirts flaring our around her knees, like a lady. She hasn't even flashed an ankle. "Ok, so. Here's what I think of your warning." She boops him on the nose. "Now. I have a garden party at two this afternoon, so if I don't start last minute preparations now, somebody's not getting their hors d'oeuvres, and I don't have to tell you how even a triple poisoner is completely harmless next to a middle-aged parishioner who misses out on the snacks. Leave, and in a few months when I have enough evidence, I'll have you arrested. Right now, you are just wasting my time."

You can't turn your back on someone like this, so when she stands up, she grabs Kol's revolver off the mantle, groping around behind her for it, and turns it on him with her sternest Not Impressed face.

He knocks the gun out of her hand and throws her down into one of the armchairs.

He's completely incensed; he grabs her by the hair and bends her head back so he can loom over her all doom-like, still pinched around his lips, and with no color in his cheeks, but he's one toe out of the asylum if the whispers are correct, and she forgot to account for the effect of crazy on the human pain threshold.

He doesn't want to lose his composure; she can see him struggling with it. This was supposed to be his Moment, she was supposed to cower, kneel, etc. "Send my regards to my brother," he says, a little breathlessly, and for a moment she thinks, he's incandescent, you can see his rage from the street, through the fog, through the rain she can hear now against her window, but it's not just anger, it's a different kind of strain in his voice, he licks his lips, he looks down into her eyes, for a moment he just hovers there, half an inch away.

He pulls back with the gun in her hand, and cracks his neck, and now for a moment she realizes here it is, she's about to die, Kol will return to find her splattered across the wall and scattered all about her couch (he looks like a mutilator), but, no, he puts the gun in his jacket, and walks backward to her analysis table, smiling the way he did when she first turned back to him with the letters in her hand. "This looks important," he says, and picks up one of her beakers.

He drops it.

He swaps the labels on three of her beakers, breaks another, takes all of her pipettes.

The hat is retrieved from the floor, and with a flourish, he rolls it all the way up his arm to his head, where he settles it at an angle.

"Good day, Miss Forbes," he says in his Downtrodden Clerk voice, winking. "You may keep the letters. A little souvenir, if you will."

She chases him all the way out into the street, but he's vanished into the fog.

* * *

She throws open the door to her apartment just as Kol shoots one of the vases from her Aunt Vespa.

It explodes; for a moment she staggers back against the wall, her ears ringing. "What are you doing!" she yells. "How many times have I told you no shooting in the house?"

He spreads his arms, and then takes aim again. "Come on, darling; that vase was a travesty. I've done it and your decor a favor."

She wrenches the gun away from him before he can take another shot and, after struggling briefly with herself, to pistol whip or not to pistol whip, she puts it aside on the mantel where there is now an empty spot, courtesy of his brother. "I had a visitor this morning," she says as he throws himself down on her couch, where he's already discarded his wrinkled jacket.

"A gentlemen caller? If he was any good, send him my way after you're done with him. Maybe ding him up a bit emotionally first. They're more open to strange, morally repugnant things that way."

"It was your brother."

He sits up slowly on the couch, like he can't be lying down for this news. "Nik? Did he hurt you?"

"He broke and/or stole half of my analysis table!"

"So, only your ego's a bit roughed up then?" he asks, and now he swings himself off the couch and comes over to examine her, lightly touching her chin. "You could be a lot worse for the wear after an encounter with Nik."

"Did you get my note?" she demands, rounding on him as he makes his way back to the sofa, rolling up one of the sleeves that's sagged down his arm a little. He's been carousing in style somewhere; his hair is all roughed up, the jacket he's slung over the sofa with a new tear in its left arm and that pungent hanger-on opium that will take her days to air out of the apartment.

"Is that what was crinkling underneath me?" he asks, throwing himself down on top of it again, and flinging one arm up over his eyes. "Listen, darling, I'd love to read up on whatever sin I've committed this time, leaving fingerprints on the mantel, bumping the easy-chair and removing it one quarter of an inch from its proper place, etc., etc., but I'm fagged. It's been a long night. Lots of sex."

She rips the note out from underneath him and hurls it onto his face. "Put my bookcase back in order by the time I'm home, or else. The note explains it in exacting but succinct terms, which I'm sure you'll appreciate. You can read and still have time to clean up the muddy bootprints you left all over the rug."

"You're not angry at me, darling. Take it out on my brother. I can give you the names of several establishments where you just might so happen to bump into him."

"I'm angry at both of you. For all of his other glaring defects, _he_ didn't track mud all over my apartment, or take my encyclopedia."

He opens his eyes and creases his face into something smirkily reminiscent of his brother. "You can have it back for the price of that woman's contact info, the one from the case with the snake?"

"No."

He sighs way too dramatically and works his shoulders back into the sofa, propping one of his boots on the armrest. "I can obtain it through less savoury means, but I'm a gentleman as you know, I thought I'd ask you first. And with a recommendation from her savior, it's less work for me."

"I'm not giving you as a 'recommendation' to anyone. I'm not evil. A little bit sharp sometimes, when people can't be bothered to do things the way I tell them to, but not evil."

"What time is your party?" he asks without opening his eyes. He's beating his boots to some invisible rhythm, showering little bits of mud and who knows what other street detritus onto the floor.

"Two. Precisely."

"Right. I'll see you then, darling."

"No, you won't. You're not invited."

"I invited myself. No party is complete without me."

"It's lawn croquet and cucumber sandwiches, not cocaine and group sex."

"Do you see why you need me?" he says, and deftly shifts his hip so the shoe she throws at him bounces instead off the sofa and falls with a thud to the floor.

* * *

Caroline is some days complaining about his brother; Nik tends to have that effect on women. You ought to meet their sister.

London is similarly tempestuous, and for an entire week pours down every cloud onto the miserable horses and the griping workers which through their bow-window pass in white fairy steams that insulate them from the watchers above.

Nik makes three attempts on her life; she's not very fussed about them. There's a dramatic moment when an aspiring assassin shoots at her from a hansom passing at full gallop, he thought that was going to be quite a show, but Caroline merely landed the ever-present cane smack into the wheel spokes, crashed the carriage, overtook the assassin, and in full view of Constable Something trussed him like a pig for easy transportation.

Anyway, he won't even mention the poisoned letter. Not Nik's finest. One rather wonders if he's even trying.

They're sitting before the fire warming their feet, his own in Caroline's lap, which he must share with a bundle of papers she's perusing, when downstairs someone rings the bell.

A constable is shown into the flat by Mrs. Hudson, an unfamiliar one, new by the looks of him, somewhat nervous in the presence of all those blonde curls and white skin, very virginal of you, darling, and taking off his hat in order to occupy them in some way, stammers out, "Constable Hopkins. Inspector Lestrade's sent me round to knock you up, miss. Ma'am." He clears his throat, and adopts a more manly mien. Excellent, darling. "Sorry to intrude upon you, but there's been a murder out at Woodman's Lee. Rather frightful one; Inspector Lestrade's on site at the moment, and says we must have your assistance."

Caroline sets aside her papers, but doesn't disturb his feet. "Give me a brief sketch of the events."

Constable Hopkins is somewhat taken aback. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not one of Lestrade's constables; I don't have to come running just because he's summoned me. So I want to know if the case is of any interest to me. Also, Lestrade's kind of a…"

"Prat?" he supplies.

"Yes. So it has to be something of significant intrigue to persuade me to actually work alongside him. You can speak in front of my colleague; he often accompanies me on cases," she says in response to the glance the constable throws at him from beneath his lashes, a sideways thing, very hurtful.

"A man's been spit clean through with one thrust of a spear; I don't know how any man could have done it, miss. Not with that sort of force."

"Oh," she says, and sits forward with her fingers beneath her bottom lip, and in so doing lending herself a resemblance to Nik that she'd hardly appreciate.

"Captain Peter Carey was found dead in his cabin this morning; the wife and daughter sent to the village for the police. And what we found- it's like a slaughterhouse, miss. Inspector Lestrade says he hasn't seen anything like it since that poor girl what was slashed at George Yard."

"Ok," she says, as if God proclaiming a judgement upon His subjects.

* * *

The following week is uncommonly busy; Caroline darts here and there to all the various districts unraveling some particularly knotty skein or another; the Irregulars peep in and out at steady intervals to leave their missives in the sitting room. He sees Enzo three times in as many days.

Having then to amuse himself, he engages in those revels which common decency has taught him must be abhorred and which on the contrary he finds quite natty, but even these pale eventually: one does tire of orgies and the various thorny intrigues which inevitably spring up between participants.

He didn't believe it either, darlings.

He does poke two of Whitechapel's more touchy gangs into open warfare, but that's hardly any challenge. On Tuesday he flagellates Countess Maria and her lover, on Wednesday cheats a prince out of half his inheritance, and on a drizzly Thursday, stands with his jacket turned up to those invasions of mist and smoke which, in trying to gain admittance to his back, curl innocently round his collar to test its wooly mettle.

From the pub across the street there is raised a cry of "Thief", hardly worth even turning round for, and so he continues hovering with the handsomest angle of his face turned toward the passing cabs and dogcarts, lingering with just enough casualness that he may say it's only that accident of fate which has happened to deposit him here, adjacent to her flat, nothing would be so absurd as to suggest he's waiting as an abandoned dog pines after its master, and has tired of lying round the flat, and come here, where he will spot her first.

August has nearly finished and autumn come firmly into the full flower of its assurance that its reign will be a prolonged one and the horses, sensing this before any of their bundled masters, droop their heads with the burden of this presentiment, kicking at the mud. Watch the beasts, whose barometers are always tuned to that special frequency which man will never sense till its blundered into his courtyard, and found all the chinks in his windows.

He blows into his hands.

He's just decided to nip into the pub when he spots a man coming along the pavement opposite him, in just his shirtsleeves, and under a Donegal hat that's capitulated somewhat pathetically to the downpour, and sags forward over his eyes. He's at least a head taller than most of those passersby who jostle him in their own preoccupied rush toward those goals at which all passersby are always straining, and stops before the flat, where he rings the bell and waits politely for a response, though he's soaked.

The page Billy admits him, and within a minute he's come back out into the rain with his hands in his pockets, so he's either a disappointed client or one of those Baker Street Irregulars to which Caroline is always adding.

He looks straight ahead for just a moment, across the street to a spot where their eyes may meet halfway, and hold for merely a second in that incidental collaboration of strangers who are occasionally thrown from their own sphere into another's.

The man only looks at him for a moment, and then strolls on away down the pavement.

He sees that he's got very blue eyes.

* * *

When Caroline is chewing over something, when her mind must worry at it for some time, she reorganizes her newspaper editions till she has got at the soul of it.

There is absolute silence at these moments.

The moon laps at the bow-window, solitary in its reign; the street lamps have been put out.

He flips the cylinder of his revolver in and out, having recently oiled it so that the movement will not bring Caroline's Wrath onto his head; if you think his brother, who has ended an entire bloodline and buried not less than two of his sister's husbands, is fodder for your tales, fabled bogeyman of those closet recesses which whisper down their superstitions with their mothballs, you ought to disturb Caroline in the midst of her tidying.

As with most of his stories, this begins: once upon a time when he was drunk. And there he'll stop. The details are too horrific; there is a triple murderer incarcerated at Newgate, a strangler, very mad, who cried upon the retelling of them.

When she's come round to the sofa where she'll put her feet in his lap and her head back against the rest he may breathe again. She sighs and thrusts her hands into her hair; the newsprint has left a smudge on her cheek. "What is it this time? The orange pips?" he asks her, tweaking the toes in his lap.

"No, I solved that one yesterday. It's your brother."

"Has he tried to kill you again? I can break one of his kneecaps with a bat, but I can't guarantee I can get to the other before he shoots me. Still, I'm willing to try."

"He hasn't bothered me in days."

"And that disappoints you?"

"It concerns me. It means he's…lurking somewhere."

"That is one of Nik's favourite means of transportation."

She's got that look on her face again: when something has perplexed her beyond the usual twists of a Tuesday letter bombing, she takes her bottom lip between her teeth and forms her hands into a little prayer knot beneath her chin. His brother has stumped her. His brother does that to most people. You could have slept beside him in his mother's belly, and still not fathom all the human drivings which must be at work somewhere, somewhere.

The wind begins tapping at the window, and raising in the chimney a keening between life and death: a howl which is at once one and the other, and in a breath sounds the clans' knells, and in the next cries after its youth. Only winter can with one bay fetch spring in green reminisce to the consumptive's lonely breast and in distant graveyards lower its frozen dead. And here it's only 26 August.

Caroline taps her feet in his lap, and he says at last, resting one hand on her ankle, "You can't beat Nik, Caroline. He destroys everything. Always. It's what he does."

But you cannot present her with an impossibility. A mind that large knows there are infinities beyond the brain's paltry reach: there is a resolution to every puzzle. Because one discovers or does not discover it does not preclude its existence.

"We'll see," she says, and smiles, poking him cheekily in the chin with her toe.

He licks it.

"Gross!"

"I've licked far worse things, darling."

* * *

Two days later, she marches into the room while he's at table, drooping over his breakfast, and lays a paper down flat on the empty plate beside him. "Do you know anything about this?"

It's a clean white sheet, very plain, and folded twice horizontally:

534 C2 13 127 36 31 4 17 21 41

Douglas 109 293 5 37 Birlstone

26 Birlstone 9 47 171

He spares one eye for it, and then returns to feeding his rather voracious hangover some toast. "It's a piece of paper with some gibberish on it."

"It's a cipher message."

"Do you have the cipher?"

"No."

"Then it's gibberish." The toast opens negotiations with his stomach: to the better man goeth victory, etc. Ten shillings on the toast.

"Your brother sent it to me two days ago. It's obviously a reference to a book, more precisely, specific words on a specific page. And two days later I still have neither the book nor the teensiest, tiniest hint as to which book I need to look at." She flaps the paper at him. "And you know nothing about this?"

"I haven't seen Nik in a week. And anyway, darling, do you really think he'd give me the very key to whatever Nefarious Scheme he's trying to draw you into? If he hasn't given you the name of the book, it's because he wants you to sort it out on your own."

She sighs, looks tormented for a moment, Why Me I'm Pretty, God isn't supposed to punish these sorts of specimens; if you've paid any attention whatsoever to humanity's oeuvre, you'll see the victor is always the maiden, and never the wolf.

"Ok. Ok." She brings her hands together underneath her chin and begins to pace. "He cannot expect me to freaking…pluck one book at random from the last thousand years of literature or turn every library upside down attempting to find it. So. So." She turns back and forth along the table, her skirts swishing after her. "It's something common. It's something…most people would have. Something you could easily get ahold of. Not the Bible, because, obviously. The cipher starts with '534', probably a page number, so a large book; that narrows it down a little. C2...C2." She turns round and begins her next row, clapping the tips of her fingers a little beneath her nose. "Not chapter; if we're beginning on page 534, we'd be way past the second chapter."

"You haven't read any of Nik's books, darling, have you? You ought to; they're good for a laugh. He takes copies of them round to all the booksellers and replaces whatever's in the window with his own. He fancies himself a much better poet than he is."

She tilts her heads, and removes her fingers from beneath her nose. "He wouldn't-"

"Force you to read one of his books by means of a cryptic message which would seem to carry some dire warning/prophecy you need to solve before it's too late and all of London is doomed? He absolutely would. But I don't imagine that's what he's getting at."

"C2, then. Column. Column two- yes; that makes much more sense. So, a large book, printed in columns- long ones, since one of the words is listed as the 293rd. A book that has to be common, or else how could he expect me to solve it? And that's what he wants me to do, isn't it; he wants me to play this freaking game. So, double columns, more than 534 pages, and common. And it has to be some kind of standardized text- page 534 in his book is exactly the same as page 534 in mine."

He sits back in his chair; his stomach has triumphed, for the moment. He watches her pace back and forth, back and forth, trailing all her suppositions after her, in a sort of under the breath babbling which suddenly ceases for the moment before the revelation, when she has to freeze for just a moment to let it seep into all the corners of her, and overturn every other observation which plays always at the perimeter of her mind, the ray of sunlight on the table and the fleck of dried blood on his left thumb, the vague lives of the city beyond their window which in making their usual rustlings of existence illuminate for her some unknown extrapolations that lie for him in a sullen murk.

"Not the dictionary- too random, too curt. You'd have trouble sending a message with that."

And then she turns, and she screams, "Almanac!" at him and pops the hands out to either side. "Whitaker's Almanac!"

She's very cute when she deduces.

He's taken up in spite of himself; she just sweeps you along so that the rebelling stomach is forgotten, and the headache resigned to understudy.

She snatches the required book off her shelf and brings it over to the table; he comes out of his chair to bend over the pages as she rifles through to '534', where both of them tap their fingers along the columns, counting off words till number thirteen is reached. 'There," she calls out.

"Is," he replies.

And then 'danger' 'may' 'come 'soon'; he catches up the letter she left on the empty plate beside his half-finished breakfast, and scratches down each word as she calls them out.

"There is danger may come very soon one Douglas rich country now at Birlstone House Birlstone confidence is pressing."

Caroline stands for a moment looking over the sheet of paper, the open almanac forgotten in front of her.

And then: "Get your coat," she snaps, running for her own room. " _Now_."

* * *

_The reader will forgive if I here pause and scribble down a bit of scenery._

_Birlstone squats on the northern border of Sussex, where it has lived for centuries. Its humble cottages have for some time sweated against the approach of that abominable weed which society calls the wealthy, who, having been charmed by its woods and chalk downs, now encroach on the harrows and mushrooms._

_The star around which these lesser beings revolve, trifling crumbs of elegance which have broken with the main nucleus and suffer now at its gilded hem, is the Manor House of Birlstone. It is to this august building our narrative has now turned. In the days of Hugo de Capus the soldiers of the first crusade leant their heads here and dreamt of infidels; in the 16th century God thumbed his nose at this bit of history and sent his fires to obliterate it._

_But man and his structures are never so quickly defeated; the Jacobeans raised a country house on the very spot, taking some of the charred corner stones for themselves and so incorporating their ancestors into the very foundation of what you can now see for yourself on a ramble through the countryside, very much as it looked in the 17th century, the outer moat having dried out but the inner still guarding for nigh forty feet the original gables and windows._

_But it's not for this house you have come._

_We turn our eye, then, to the dogcart rattling at top speed along through the mud toward this house, much to the regret of its sweating bearer. In it are two figures, quite snugly tucked against one another. Dusk is just falling. In the country, dusk is no mere vanishing from grey to black; here every shade of red and no poet's pen to transcribe them. The man is broad-shouldered, handsome, but half-dressed, for a gentlemen, in dapper trousers but with no jacket, and his sleeves turned back to his elbows._

_She is particularly stunning on this day. There is some shade of gold which might depict for the reader some 1/10th of the impression which her curls must have made on a curious wanderer walking the road at that precipitous hour, but language has not yet invented it. She wears trousers and a man's jacket, tailored to her own slight form, but the hair bounces about her shoulders, hindered by neither pins nor hat._

_Here the dogcart stops before the manor and then is handily turned round, its charges having alighted. What precisely happens in the house is of no consequence: it is enough to know the man wades up to his thighs in the moat and boosts the woman over the windowsill of a small room to the right of the drawbridge, and afterward pulls himself._

_There is no shot._

_Birlstone drowsily watches the sun steal away into its woods, and farther still beyond them._

_It is here, having prevented His skillful ministrations to Fate, she becomes_ the _woman._

* * *

When she walks into the apartment shaking September 1st from her bonnet, Kol picks up the Eastern Morning News edition lying at his elbow on the breakfast table, and with a snap unfurls it.

He clears his throat.

"Another Whitechapel tragedy. Brutal murder of a woman. The Central News says: 'Following close upon the recent ghastly tragedy in Whitechapel, Londoners were yesterday horrified to hear of a similar outrage perpetrated in a manner which has seldom been equaled for brutality. At a very early hour in the morning a constable on beat duty found lying in Bucks-row, a narrow thoroughfare abutting on Thomas-street, Whitechapel, the dead body of a woman about 40 years of age. The throat was gashed with two cuts, penetrating from the front of the neck to the vertebrae. The body was at once taken to the Whitechapel mortuary, where it was found that the unfortunate victim's abdomen had been ripped up from thighs to breast in a most revolting manner, the intestines protruding from three deep gashes. The clothes were cut and torn in several places, and the face was bruised and much discoloured. The woman's dress seems to show that she was in poor circumstances and marks upon some of the undergarments indicate that she has been an inmate of the Lambeth Workhouse. This summarises the facts of the case. All besides, is in profound mystery. And so forth and so on, we humbly submit our outrage for this woman we from our moral pinnacles spit at, unless she's on fire, etc. etc. Sound like your department, darling?"

But whether it is or is not her department lies unuttered on her lips because at the door there is a sudden thrumming, tentative and rapped out at the height of her chest: the page Billy, then.

She opens the door.

"Telegram for you, ma'am," he says, handing it over. "And there's a hansom downstairs. Says he's to take you to Scotland Yard."

She exchanges a look with Kol. "I didn't call a cab."

"I can dismiss him, if you like?" Billy ventures.

But she holds up one hand and she opens the telegram and here the mystery unravels in Lestrade's blocky printing which urges her at once to drop all momentary concerns and hurry to the station on a matter of 'no small importance'.

"Tell the driver I'll be down in a moment," she says, and sees him out the door.

"The Scotland Yard dress?" Kol asks, already standing. He throws back the remainder of his coffee.

"The Scotland Yard dress," she confirms.

* * *

You have to remember, all these eyes, all these men, and stroll in like before you lies only one long hall, and at its end your throne.

She takes one deep breath.

She lets Kol open the door for her, and then she sweeps inside this storm of typewriters which raise in each corner a flurry of grapeshot, and from down the corridor to the left there drifts the cries of the suspects who moan from their 9th circle all the protestations which only a guilty man can submit, there was never a purer babe to walk the earth, and through these maelstroms of man and machine the looks fished up from every nook and cranny, so that you must greet them chin up, chest out, and spin the lacy parasol you can't put down, you will not let them make you some honorary man, an otherly creature, neither girl nor boy, an in-between, they will know every flirty twist of your wrist, and the swish of each silken layer.

"Hello, darling," Kol says, and pinches the butt of one particularly bitch-eyed constable who tries to glare her back into her tea room.

And then they turn the corner, past the evidence room, beyond the mortuary, to the left of the hall where Inspector Lestrade keeps his tidy little office.

The door is open.

"Let me see your best 'I can see all the way through to your tiny cock' smile," Kol tells her.

She obliges.

"Excellent, darling."

He walks through first, and just for a moment eclipses her view.

And then she clears the doorway and she sees a man seated in front of Lestrade, his back to the door, but she knows this head, she knows the curls, unkempt, Kol usually slicks back his own hair but this man- this man wants you to see he has had no hand in his attractiveness, God just sort of swept in and said, 'and so he was perfect' and rolled him from bed to frock coat with the hair disheveled, not so you'd mistake him for any shamble-footed vagabond, plying the tender hearts of silk-hatted ladies, but with just that touch of casualness, so you know: oh, this old thing? It just came that way.

" _You_ ," she snaps.

Lestrade looks up from Kol's hand, which he has gripped a little too hard: you always have to prove your manliness around one of those sodomites, after all. "Ah, Miss Forbes. I'm pleased you could make it so quickly." He isn't. He's smiling through his teeth.

But Klaus stands and turns to her with an entirely genuine smile, his most cherubic dimples in both cheeks. "Miss Forbes; so pleased to see you." He holds out one hand as if to take hers, coming around his chair with his hat in the other.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she demands.

Lestrade sits back in his chair, looking amused. "Ah, yes, Mr. Mikaelson; Miss Forbes' theories about you are a bit of an inside joke here at Scotland Yard. It's possible you've heard you are apparently the most dangerous and well-connected criminal in all of London?"

Klaus smiles ruefully. "I hear rather the entirety of England. Perhaps even the world. But that's all right. Whatever she thinks of me, I humbly submit to her judgements." He bows a little. "It's quite all right, inspector. We've had a bit of a misunderstanding between the two of us in the past, but there's no one else I'd rather you consult on this gruesome business."

"A _misunderstanding_?" she nearly shrieks, and in the corner where he's taken over a chair for himself, and sits slouched and twirling one of his cuff links between his knuckles (he can never keep them on), Kol puts his hand to his nose and then drops it beneath his chin.

She takes another breath.

He has already gotten so completely too much satisfaction from her, so she steels her shoulders, she sets her parasol in the corner, she sits down in the chair next to him and folds her hands primly in her lap, and not for one single second does she look at him as he seats himself once more, his knee touching hers.

She does keep an eye out for any opportunity to stomp his foot beneath the jagged little heel of her boot.

With ears alone she takes in Lestrade's monologue as he begins to expound on the murder Kol rattled off to her from the Eastern Morning News. Mary Ann Nichols, also called 'Polly', inmate of Lambeth Workhouse for seven years, killed elsewhere and later deposited where her discoverers found her, in the opinion of the doctor who examined her on-site.

She shuts out the squeaking of Kol's chair as he swings it back and forth, pushing off the wall with his feet, and the quiet susurration of distant reports, all these niggling commotions that intrude on every mind and, elbows out, jostle for their spot in the queue, these she takes and she sweeps aside, narrowing in on him.

It's almost the Downtrodden Clerk mask he wore to her apartment; but there are shades of distinction between them. There he was left-handed, here, he leads with his right when he gestures; it was the right he offered to her in greeting. There is a note of earnestness in his voice: Daddy's little liberal benefactor, patron of the poor, throwing his pounds at the slums as if in snowing them down beneath the weight of all these donations, he can lift them somehow above their silt.

He lets some of his charm through into his voice; this he subtracted from the Downtrodden Clerk, this he adds in now, not so you can feel there is a subterranean sort of menace behind it, lurking in those depths of mankind where slink all the subcutaneous whispers of vice, a young charm, a charm with roses in its cheeks, vaguely aware of its own attractions, having not yet harnessed them, but taking advantage naturally. He means every word he says; he leans forward, into the table, into that zone where you are taken from participant to intimate; there's no artifice; Lestrade, who has seen it in all its many and varied shades, and cuffed it all the same, suns himself in its glow.

He has a smudge of charcoal on his right thumb.

She looks at this from the corner of her eye as Lestrade continues on and on and Kol thumps his chair back against the wall and from the street there is a hansom driver's enraged cry, and these she takes, and she tucks them away, she runs over the angle of the smudge, the age of it, how its worked its way into his cuticle and finely dusted the nail and the faint impression of the same mark on his right pointer finger.

She thinks: something real.

She thinks: something he wanted her to see. Something he wanted her to watch lift its head from underneath Mr. Mikaelson: Social Reformer and with one saucy blink draw her on.

So.

Fine.

She leans forward, onto the desk, mirroring his pose, resting her fingers beneath his chin.

"It was Mr. Mikaelson insisted we call you in, Miss Forbes. There's hardly any need for your presence at the moment, it's most likely one of the High Rip gangs, of course, and it won't be long before one of them informs. But, of course, Mr. Mikaelson, Scotland Yard well understands your concerns and is happy to help alleviate them," Lestrade informs her.

Klaus puts a fist to his mouth for a moment, clearly overcome. "I'm sorry, Inspector. I knew this woman from my visits to the workhouse where she lived, and it's absolutely horrendous. Those poor women, out on those bloody streets, with no other choice, and to come- to come to that sort of end." He shakes his head."

"A friend of yours?" she asks crisply.

"Well, I'd hardly call her that, Miss Forbes, we met once or twice, but, as you may know, I've done some work in such quarters. I'm building another workhouse, one with which we aim to improve upon the old model, a place where cheap lodgings can be had without the squalor, without those terrible exploitations of their brethren. If these women could afford to lay their head under a roof, they wouldn't be out on the streets exposing themselves to such vile dangers."

"You are certainly a contribution to humanity. It's England's fortune you were born here."

He pretends to completely miss her sarcasm. "Thank you," he says, and slides this bashful little smile across the desk to Lestrade. "Seems we might bury the hatchet after all, hmm?"

For just a moment, she cannot handle her inability to strangle him in front of God and half the Metropolitan force, and turns to scrunch her nose at Kol, who, bored the second Lestrade opened his mouth, is now intent on the ripostes between her and his brother.

He lifts his eyebrows.

There is a piece of hair, at the nape of Klaus' neck. One stiff clock spring of blonde he touches sometimes: Social Reformer Klaus is a bit fidgety, he doesn't have that stillness of the man from her apartment, he doesn't have that otherworldly silence, an inhuman thing, a thing you find in houses gone unloved for years. You think, looking at him, he could sit for five mercurial centuries, letting the ivy grow over him while history shifts and shifts again and whole cities die and in a decade spring from new and better fingers.

She can find a thread of it, in this Klaus. In some imperceptible movement of his elbow, you see the shade of past gestures, and then it's gone.

She sees the charcoal smudge on his thumb: she sees that, and nothing else.

His clothes have only the itinerant spices of autumnal London, soot, dirt, the smells which have risen up from the Thames and whispered in slow driftings over its people. The hems of his trousers are splashed with that distinct clay of Clay Hill, but it's a false lead: the splatter of it is just slightly off, not thrown up by passing hooves or his own shoes, but smeared on by hand, so that even his pants take her off somewhere to wander in confused ravings.

She rises gracefully from her chair. "Do you have the woman's belongings here?"

"Hmm?" Lestrade asks, looking up from his conversation with Klaus, which has progressed on without her, as most conversations between men do.

"Mary Ann Nichols? Do you have her belongings here? Her clothes, anything she had on her when she died?"

"Oh; yes, of course. But that won't do you much good, Miss Forbes; of course we've already identified her, and she wasn't carrying much. Certainly nothing of significance."

Klaus has sat back in his chair, and folded his hands beneath his chin. For just an instant, you see him flicker to the surface: he looks at her rather than Lestrade when he speaks, and she feels this thing.

She doesn't want to say a shiver.

"Let her be the judge of that."

* * *

He stands in the doorway of the evidence room watching her.

She turns over a white handkerchief in her hands, reading in it what men cannot parse.

About her feet splash the yards of blue satin, foaming round the delicate toes which flirt from beneath it; she has done up her hair as for a ball. The gloved hands turn the deceased's articles over and over; the magnifying glass trawls each corner and seam for its hidden cache, panning at streambeds where the mere mortal has long since cast off his hope with his sieve.

He clasps his hands behind his back.

He wets his lips.

He steps forward with a smile.

He leans in so close he can smell the rosewater on her neck, and drops his voice so no straining ear may hear what is only for her, there is only the two of them, he wants her to understand, yes, yes, somewhere a world of sweating humanity toiling away at its survival, but when he enters a room, love, what you may sense with your peripheral vision and hear faintly belling in your ears is but cake frippery.

She does not tense when his nose grazes her neck. The handkerchief is set aside in favor of a comb, and this too is thrust beneath the glass, where its tines loom fantastically.

"I hear you received my message? It would seem poor Birlstone lives to see another day."

"How are your testicles?" she asks with an edge in her voice, turning over the comb.

He smiles. "Fully recovered, if you're inquiring for reasons of personal interest."

She does not engage with that; pity.

He pulls back now, keeping his hands clasped, and pacing in ever narrowing loops as a predator might run down its prey, so that she must filter out the clicking of his heels on the floor, and shuck off that instinctive rime which frosts the boldest of hearts in his presence, cringing, as they ought, before those communal nightmares of all humans, which see in him the faceless terrors of those woodland loams to whom midnight applies its most threatening violets.

"It's not a gang," he says, staying always just out of her peripheral vision, so she must feel rather than see him. "I would know. I own most of them."

"Is it you?" she asks sweetly, still not bothering to turn her head, and now retrieving the scrap of looking glass from the box where the last human bits of Mary Ann Nichols have been stowed.

"It's a bit sloppy, don't you think, sweetheart? I'm certain you think better of me than that. The police do not find my corpses. Unless I deem their discovery useful." He stops just behind her, leaning in once more. "Murder of this sort is very messy. I don't recommend taking a stab at it."

He waits for her laughter.

Instead, she turns round and pins on him such a look as would shrink a lesser man. "Really? _Really_?"

He likes how her indignation puffs her up; very fetching. He has somewhere in his palette a recreation of her cheek, but merely a pallid copy, and no hand, even his own, which can coax it to truer similitude.

"Your deductions, Miss Forbes?"

"None of your business. What is your interest in this anyway? We both know you can drop the fawn-eyed crap about your workhouse charity. Did she work for you?"

"I'm not a pimp; men of my abilities do not descend to such base crassness. But it does occasionally happen that these women, eager for an extra shilling or three, may be persuaded to yield up all the various sweet nothings which less cautious men let slip. And all men are less cautious in the throes of passion, with a whore for a bedfellow. Where, after all, has this fallen woman to turn? Surely not to anyone of significance. Who hears her secrets? The walls of her abode, sole ear to her drunken ramblings?"

"So you use them as spies. Blackmail? Charming."

He dimples. "I'm pleased you think so."

"You really need to stop pretending that I'm complimenting you."

He has stepped in close enough that she must either shrink back against the table or, in standing her ground, press herself indecently to his chest; she does not yield, as he predicted, and stands nose to nose with him, coldly, both arms crossed over her breast, and the magnifying glass tapping impatiently against her elbow. "I trust you're properly intrigued?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

"I would rather be this man's next victim than work for you."

Ah, but you see she's captivated; minds such as this do not merely skim the surfaces of such conundrums, leave a bit of foam in their wake, ascend once more to sturdier shores. Already she turns it about in her mind, ascertaining from whence trickles all its tells: perhaps the realm of spirits roams in free anonymity, but man leaves his prints in the dust, no matter how scanty his heel.

She steps back so that she may circle him now, tapping the magnifying glass, looking at him from beneath her long lashes; he turns in sync with her to mirror her steps, hands still behind his back, the smile growing on his face as she cocks her head and, having failed to glean from the press of his trousers and the buttons on his vest anything which he does not want her to foretell, asks instead, "Do you think they're being targeted precisely because they're your employees, or simply because they're prostitutes, any old lunatic who can keep it together for three seconds can lure them off into a dark alley?"

"Either way, my employees are dying by a hand not my own."

She rolls her eyes.

"You know," she says, and resumes her pacing. "It might be easier for me to tackle this case if somebody hadn't destroyed my analysis table. Also? Your brother broke my microscope while he was playing with it."

"Yes, Kol can be somewhat trying. You should never let him touch anything." He stops.

And this too she mirrors, turning so they are once more face to face, all the color in her cheeks now, and in her eyes the spark of something which he may be so bold as to call a beginning.

* * *

When she returns home from the mortuary, her chemicals have all been replaced; there's an entire bundle of pipettes on the work table.

And beside this: a brand new Powell & Lealand with a bow around it.

* * *

Next morning, Caroline wakes him by tearing the blanket off him. "Up, up, up, up, up!" she calls, now wrenching open the curtains. London, having recklessly allied itself with her, stabs him in the eye with a ray of sunlight.

In the sitting room, a mug of tea and a piece of toast are each thrust into his hand, the shirt he has haphazardly buttoned set to rights, a tie thrown and rapidly knotted round his neck.

"It's eight o'clock in the morning," he tells her, blinking.

"I know; I let you sleep in. And as a thank you, you're going to go through all of these," she says, and onto the breakfast table she deposits a stack of newspapers which shudders the entire structure; the floor lists as in a storm. "That's Enzo and Tim," she calls out half a second before the bell sounds downstairs.

"Who's Tim?" he asks.

Tim, it happens, is the man he saw some days ago, in his shirtsleeves and Donegal, one of Caroline's many unofficial agents which she has trained and ranged about the streets of London so it may not so much as breathe without lifting her bright and nosy head towards its stirrings.

He's a good half a foot taller than Enzo, and hangs back while customary greetings commence between Caroline and her favourite Irregular; brown-haired, a sandy sort of hue, from what he can make out beneath the hat, and with the end of it curling at the nape of his neck, an untamable piece at which its owner scratches in agitation.

The blue eyes are framed with lashes Bekah would envy, and the shaved cheeks smooth as a child's; a boyish twenty-four, he wagers.

His profile is stunning.

"Kol Mikaelson," he says, coming forward with his hand out to get a look at the entire thing.

"Tim O'Sullivan," Caroline replies for him, grabbing both their hands as they move to shake the other and flinging them back toward their respective owners. "Now. Boys. Murderers don't just spring out of the ether fully formed. So. This man must have some sort of rehearsal, maybe an earlier murder, maybe some assaults- we're looking for anything with any sort of passing resemblance to the recent mutilations in Whitechapel. He spent some time refining this. Set aside anything involving stabbings with no apparent motive, any violent attacks against prostitutes, all of it, I want it here." She slaps the table with her hand. "We'll go back to the beginning of this year, and then farther back, if necessary. Enzo." She heaves another stack onto the table.

Tim appears slightly overwhelmed; it's a good look for him, very crinkly about the eyes.

"Kol." She taps the one with which she opened his morning, and beside it adds a third, pointing at Tim; he jumps a bit. "I want your findings alphabetized, and in chronological order. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Enzo drawls, but facetiously; Tim is not so jaunty about his answer, and mutely nods.

"I don't see a fourth stack, darling. Are you merely cracking the whip today?"

"Nope; I have errands to take care of. Be back in an hour, and you can all present me with your findings then."

* * *

There are two incidences which Caroline deems noteworthy.

The first is from the 25th of February, which saw 38-year-old widow Annie Millwood admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary for stab wounds to the legs and lower part of her abdomen, inflicted (in her own somewhat tipsy words) by a strange man who took out a clasp knife and stabbed her.

On March 28th, 39-year-old 'dressmaker' Ada Wilson opened her door to a man about 30, around 5' 6", fair moustache and sunburnt face who threatened to kill her if she didn't give him money, and, when refused, stabbed her twice in the throat. Ada's neighbors, being somewhat skeptical of the legitimacy of any dressmaker who caters to an all-male clientele in those blistery morning hours of butchers and candlestick makers (ought he to have resisted that?), have added to the reports their own interpretations of the victim's career.

Caroline paces in front of the table, tapping her chin. "Ok. She's our most likely connection, then, but I'll send someone around to ask at the Infirmary about Millwood too. She's dead now, but there must be a record somewhere of the attack, and maybe someone still on staff who personally treated her." She spins round toward Tim, and says, quite abruptly, "Take off your clothes."

"What? Me clothes?" Tim freezes over the stack he's still sifting through. He's a nice soft accent, touch of Dublin in it, and in its foundations something farther south that he can't place.

"You too, Enzo," she adds, and Enzo, ever obedient, only shrugs and begins to divest himself of his trousers. He's lamentably free of sodomistic urges, but a perfect eye full, which he leans back to enjoy, putting up his feet on the heap of papers he's given up halfway through, and which Tim has undertaken to finish.

Tim looks at him.

"You heard what she said, darling." He settles in to watch; Tim has a set of shoulders on him which he is quite sure will prove a perfectly commendable leg rest once naked.

Caroline has dashed off to her room and returned with a police uniform thrown over either arm; the left she hands to Enzo, and the right to Tim, who remains defiantly clothed. Absolute rubbish, if you ask him.

"Enzo, you're off to the infirmary at the workhouse. You will ask these questions." She thrusts a notebook at him. "Tim, you're going to interrogate Ada Wilson and any chatty neighbors." She pushes another notebook into his dumb hands, which have only just accepted the uniform and hang now woodenly uncertain of their mechanical duties. "Oh, wait! Sorry; I forgot you're actually a nice man with a sense of modesty. I'm used to Kol."

"I resent that," he says.

"You're complimented by that. Anyway," she continues, turning to Tim, and shooing him along with clucking tongue and little flaps of her hands, "you can change in my room, on the right. Don't use Kol's; he'll 'just so happen' to remember he needs something in there and walk in on you."

"This is a terrible assassination of my character," he assures Tim.

"Move!" Caroline demands, clapping her hands sharply, and skittering Tim on ahead of her as if fleeing a hunter, or perhaps a plague. "Enzo, sit in that chair; it's time for your makeup."

* * *

She sends Enzo and Tim off to their respective tasks, moustached, balding, Tim badly pox-scarred on his left cheek, Enzo with a mole on his right.

She walks George Yard in a jacket and trousers with Kol and his three pistols (sometimes you just need options, darling, he told her while secreting them all over). Lestrade and his men will have trampled everything, of course, and the thousands of shambling lives afterward which leave all their existence in their wake.

But there's always something to be learned. You can press your ear to the ground and listen to all ten thousand revelations shiver up from its soil, if you're willing, if you say to the voice which points out all the tread and re-tread trails that merge, mingle, shoot off in random directions, shh, shh, _listen_.

She lies down where the woman died.

Imagine: there is this fathomless dark, somewhere in some other world there is this rumored 'sun', and the hills put up their heads to touch it. But here you just pass from dark darker darkest and back again and if in daylight you're followed by all those normal hauntings of full noon you never even notice, the dress swishing round your heels and the cabs bellowing past, every ill-fated child with their hands hopefully in your pockets, here every myth stirs, shakes off its dust, roars from every niche and alley to turn against you your own beating heart.

She shuts her eyes.

Kol has kneeled beside her, but she doesn't notice that, she registers the warmth near her right side, she hears him push both of his hands into his pockets, she forgets all that.

So you pass through all these layers of dark dark darkest, each boom of your heart leaping you from one to the next, and that ever-present threat of your own footsteps, turning you around and around again, but ahead: this spit of land after a fatal sea.

You reach the George Yard Buildings and maybe you lean your hands on your knees; you take a deep breath.

She opens her eyes.

"There wasn't a struggle," she says aloud. "Nobody heard anything. She got here safely. She didn't live here, but she wasn't being pursued." She leaps to her feet. Kol watches her from where he's kneeling, hands still in his pockets. "She had a drinking problem, so. She's squandered the last of her earnings on alcohol." She turns toward the front of the tenement, puts out her hand to touch it. "She stops for a moment to lean on the building. And in the interim, she's strangled, and stabbed thirty nine times. Why would you stab someone thirty nine times?"

"Because I'm very angry with them," Kol replies.

"Exactly. But if this same man murdered Mary Ann Nichols, it wasn't Martha Tabram he was angry with."

She whisks out her magnifying glass and kneels next to Kol, going over each inch of the steps and all the surrounding area one painful centimeter at a time, crawling along through the soot and the horse manure and at intervals stopping to lay nearly flat, with her nose half an inch from the street.

It isn't until nearly twilight that they reach Buck's Row; Kol unbuttons his jacket and displays one of his pistols openly.

She repeats her whole meticulous process while the sun retires and the lamps are lit and there begins to slither from the alleyways and side streets the worst of the surrounding districts.

She paces around the spot where Mary Ann Nichols was left, measuring and examining and from every corner of the stable yard and the narrow street leading to it running the glass, touching the cobblestones with her fingers, remarking every stray fleck and smear.

Kol stands somewhere behind her back the entire time, watching the passersby, and whipping out his murder credentials every time someone lingers suspiciously: "My brother is Satan, At Your Service Mikaelson" he probably says, and escorts them on their way.

But once he threw a client out their window for calling her an 'impudent slut' and of the guy who tried to revenge himself by bombing her hansom at Scotland Yard after the arrest of one of his associates, there remains no precise trail of his last moments; pieces of him are still washing up on the Thames. So maybe he says simply, "Hello, darling; Kol Miakelson," and they run for their lives.

He likes it when they run for their lives.

He must get it from his brother.

"So?" Kol asks her in the hansom on their way home.

"I'm thinking," she says, and settles back into the cushions.

* * *

Enzo and Tim have brought back nothing the newspapers have not already sensationalized, but there is a telegram waiting for her from He Whom She Refuses To Name.

It's full of little dancing men, articulated stick figures posed in a variety of ways, and at the bottom, his ridiculous flourish of a signature, just 'Klaus', because of course a second name is for the poor and law-abiding.

"Can your brother write a normal message?!" she snaps, and sits down to decipher it.

* * *

_The Ten Bells pub is located at the corner of Commercial and Church Streets and in our contemporary times now enjoys some small measure of fame in connection with the case I here recount. However, in this autumn of 1888, it was merely another Whitechapel fixture, unremarkable peddler of rum, issuing from its windows the raucous laughter and copious lighting of any thriving business. To the description 'clean' we must add 'suitably enough' and content ourselves with this grim yardstick of relativity._

_It stands in the company of several other such establishments, and marks a standard point on the journey of any street woman plying her trade, tavern pavements being a commendable wellspring for those drunk and pliable clients by which a lady makes her living. To reach the door, you must circumvent several of them. Such revelations will further serve our narrative in future pages, but for now it is merely a notable fact with which I dress my stage._

_In the far corner, in the very back of the pub, behind a table of seamen, there is a man; you know him well. At this stage in our tale you will have been granted merely a tantalising glimpse, but of course you have read of his past exploits, for who of any small literary ability will not have found himself drawn to this remarkable Mars?_

_It is here, however, you may feel your first flicker of pity in place of reverence. I have never known him to speak of love; too long was there a stone in place of a heart, a foundation of machinations where another man might have sewn tenderness, and walked softly in its path. Love art for men; to call Him such is to pluck the wings from Chronos._

_But he had…something for this woman. A seed, once planted, if forgotten, left unwatered, will nevertheless put down roots, and with every cunning endeavour to lift its first tender shoot in quest of life, and so too did something in him lean towards her now, seeking perhaps warmth, friendship, a duality which in her he sensed, or, perhaps, wished to sense._

_Truth be told, he was lonely._

_Let us not humanise him. Does the devil not have his rainy afternoons, does he not gaze upon the latest soul put to his rack and feel in himself neither pleasure, neither pain, does he not feel where his sensations ought to lie and find in their place a sort of frost- neither frost, but something colder still, which stuns from him every fleeting joy?_

_But he checked his pocket watch ten times in as many minutes and for twice that length of time wrestled the folds of his jacket, and nervously adjusted his tie._

_To be a customer at the moment of her entrance._

_To see the door open on what must be merely another labourer and instead the shining hair, the blue eyes, the lips, the face which shares none of its qualities with the common detective, jaded to his lot, who views with foggy disinterest the sobbing beggar and his dishevelled mother. In her there is a softness, a supreme sympathy; in her there is a heart of which he might have conceived in his long distant childhood, when he dreamt into his mother that tenderness which to children and their fancies is for some time a worthy replacement._

_He stands involuntarily._

_For him the seamen and the whores have ceased to exist. Their laughter has vanished, the barman after it, into this maw go the gaslights, the hansoms, the pervasive stink of soot and sweat._

_Perhaps it is then he ought to have known, but never are we competent diagnosers of our own frailties._

* * *

"Caroline," he says, and pulls out a chair for her.

She does not take it. She snaps, "Could you maybe send me a normal telegram like a human instead of acting like the very freaking embodiment of a moustache-twirling sensation literature villain?"

He takes his own chair and sits with his elbows upon the table, resting his fingers under his chin. "Would you care to know why you're here, love?"

"Don't call me that."

There is a certain angle at which she tilts her head to emphasize her irritation; it's quite captivating.

He smiles, looking up at her from beneath his brows.

It takes some time; in Caroline Forbes there is an unflensed core of steel which neither time nor chauvinism have whittled, and with great reluctance bends; for nearly an entire minute they look at one another, she tapping her fingers against the arms she has crossed over her breast, he patiently waiting with his pointer fingers beneath his bottom lip.

At last she takes the chair.

"A woman called Mary Ann Connelly, street alias 'Pearly Poll', claimed to have been in the presence of Martha Tabram, whom she knew as 'Emma', on the Bank Holiday night which saw her demise."

"I'm aware."

"They were in the company of two soldiers, guardsmen, a corporal and a private; the private and Tabram advanced to George Yard when the foursome split up round 11.45. Poll, either through artifice or that muzzy veil of drunkenness under which she no doubt conducted her business, failed to identify either her own client or that of Tabram. However." He leans back in his chair with some satisfaction, smiling at her. "You may have remarked I have some avenues of inquiry open to me which our dear Inspector Lestrade has neither the wherewithal nor the stomach to exploit."

She folds her hands on the table; he can see at war within her that professional curiosity and the natural derision which she heaps upon the head of talents such as his. "You found them?"

"I have it on good authority the private has recently been discharged from military duty and counts this pub among his favourite watering holes."

"I don't think you have anything on 'good' authority. Is he here now?"

"Not yet." He leans forward once more. "But that's to our fortune. Had a sniff round Buck's Row and the George Yard Buildings today, hmm?"

"Kol told you."

"Kol tells me nothing I do not already know. Let's have a crack at your own methods, shall we?" He steeples his fingers again. "These are clearly your 'deducting' clothes. You've not bothered to change, which means you've come nearly straight from an investigation and in all eagerness, if I may flatter myself, to see me."

"You may not."

He ignores that. "You're therefore on the scent of something. Perhaps only a theory, but you're turning over some possibility or another. You won't have drawn any conclusions without acquainting yourself with the facts of the case. Martha Tabram was killed nearly a month ago; any traces of the killer will have long vanished, but not for you. Nichols is fresh; you'll have been in even more eagerness to examine the site of her murder. My telegram said only 'The Tens Bells 10 o'clock'. You turned straight round and came here after decoding it on nothing stronger than the name of a pub and an appointed time, which means you anticipated something more than just the pleasure of my company. You want to know what information I have, whether it supports or obliterates your own theories, which you have not spun sitting in your armchair at 221B as you've solved so many a seemingly hopeless knot, or else you wouldn't be here. No." He licks his bottom lip and lowers his voice to that intimate level of the confidante. "This is something new, even for you, isn't it, Miss Forbes?"

She sits in absolute silence for a moment.

"Nothing is new in the annals of crime. Not even you. The evil London overlord has already been done. Jonathon Wild, Adam Worth?"

"Mere prototypes." He waves his hand. "I'm something else altogether."

She bites her bottom lip in contemplation of this, without wavering for a second in her scrutiny of him. "You might be. But Jonathon Wild and Adam Worth never had a Caroline Forbes."

"No," he says softly. "I suppose they hadn't."

* * *

He just snaps his fingers suddenly, and two men materialize out of the crowd to snatch a man just coming through the door.

They're sparring when the man enters the pub; he's trying to trip her on his dimples, and she is giving him all her very best Not Here For It. He looks at her like…she doesn't want to say. Not like an opponent. You almost see something human in him; there's this surfacing in his eyes. If Matt had looked at her like that she'd have slept away her best years in America, with his children in her arms, and she thinks careful, careful: tiptoe so, so gingerly through this.

And yet still he sees the man.

He doesn't even take his eyes off her face; he sits back in his chair. He snaps his fingers, and the barman looks up, the sailors in front of them briefly turn around, for a moment even the smoke pauses, and hangs in wary indecision near the ceiling.

The man is dragged kicking and yelling to their table and everyone looks from Klaus to elsewhere.

"What the bloody _fuck_?" he demands.

"You're in the presence of a lady, mate, let's watch our tongue, shall we?" Klaus says mildly enough, and then he leans in, he lowers his voice, he hovers his lips half an inch from the man's ear, he gives him such a caressing look. He says, "It wouldn't be the first I've cut out for impertinence."

There is no disbelieving him.

The man goes still.

"Caroline," Klaus says, without pulling back from the man, close enough to kiss him, close enough that the man must feel the breath on his neck, must feel in his chest, in his throat, this natural little quailing. "May I present to you Private John Sholto?"

"How do you know who I am? I don't know you; I've never seen you in my life!"

"That's hardly important, John. May I call you that?" he asks, clasping the man intimately round the neck, and giving him a smile that's most definitely felled a woman or two in its day. "Listen very carefully, John. You're going to answer any questions this ravishing young woman puts to you, without hesitation, without any attempt at deceit." He shakes the man a little. "Hmm? I don't see any reason you can't walk out of here with all your limbs intact, do you? Your brother's stupidity isn't genetic, so let's conduct ourselves with a bit more sense. I'm having a very nice evening." He looks pointedly at her, turning the dimples now from John and back again. "I'd hate to sully it with something so crass as splenetic fluid. You just can't get that out of your shirt. Trust me, mate, I've tried."

Private John Sholto has gone very stiff; she can see his heart beating in his throat, how his sweat rises to his brow, his upper lip, all the little nooks and crannies that first reveal their fear, and with a slow tightening of his hands around the edge of the table he croaks out, "Jimmy…Jimmy's…that was you?"

"What did you do to his brother?" she demands.

Klaus makes this faux regretful face. "Isn't there any mystery in romance anymore, love?"

"This isn't a romance? Do you think you're freaking courting me?"

He doesn't answer; he just smiles and he lets loose of the poor guy's neck and once more he leans back in his chair and puts together his fingers, raising both his eyebrows at her.

"Let me see your hands," she says at last, and John thrusts them obediently out, glancing nervously to Klaus.

She examines the nails, turns his hands over for a moment, asks him, "Are you wearing the same boots you had on when you met with Martha Tabram?", and when he answers positively, she says, "May I see them?"

She goes over the boots with first her eyes and then the glass, touches a nick on the heel, and, handing them back, says to Klaus, "He had nothing to do with it." She turns to the man. "You can go. He won't hurt you."

Private John Sholto scurries away.

"Interesting," Klaus says without unsteepling his fingers. "It's been nearly a month since Martha Tabram died. Have his hands and boots really so well preserved the traces of that night?"

"It's not what he did then; it's what he's done in the meantime," she replies without bothering to elaborate, and stands. "We're done. Don't have a good night."

"I trust my brother is lurking somewhere nearby to see you safely home?" he asks as she turns around, and she allows herself this one tiny smile, which she turns back to let him see in its full and perky smugness. "He's been here the whole time," she says, and for this tiny, tiny moment, she gets to bask in the divine glow of his flabbergasted face.

It clears her skin.

A middle-aged sailor slips away from the bar and limps up to them, favoring his right leg.

"That's a nice touch," she says.

"Thank you," Kol replies in his own voice. "Hello, Nik," he says, and leans over the table to tweak his brother's nose.

"Well," she chirps, taking the arm Kol holds out to her, "I guess we know who's better at disguises, don't we?"

And then she turns, and she flounces out of the bar.


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All newspaper extracts are real. Also, the telegram Caroline receives is a (slightly) modified version of a message from Doyle's 'The Sign of Four'. I think I said this in the previous part, but just assume all document extracts are lifted from actual historical sources or Doyle's canon itself, unless otherwise specified.
> 
> As in the first part, this is basically just one ridiculously long winky face at Doyle's original canon and the year of 1888 in general. I'll warn for graphic murder descriptions, but if you're reading this, you're probably at least vaguely familiar with the Ripper murders and how gruesome they were, and probably will not be surprised. Just be aware, I don't gloss over that; we're talking literally medical examiner levels of graphic (I may have read all the inquests on the murders). There are also some pretty gruesome details about other serial killers as well. Here is where you marvel at my criminal knowledge (and cringe, and never cross me).
> 
> Also, the line, 'He lost a brother there once' is a dig at TO; I won't explain it for the people who have somewhat followed the show and want to think about the burn, but if you don't follow the show, obviously that line will probably lose you a bit.

**The Whitechapel Tragedy**

The inquest on the body of Mary Ann Nichols, who was found murdered in Whitechapel on Friday morning last, was resumed yesterday morning before Mr. Wynne Baxter, the coroner for East Middlesex. Inspectors Sparklin and Helson gave evidence, describing the wounds and the clothing worn by the deceased. Inspector Helson stated that all the wounds could have been inflicted while the deceased wore her stays. He was of the opinion that the murder was committed on the spot. William Nichols said that deceased was his wife. She left him about seven years ago, and was given to drink. He believed she had been living with various men…

…There was a rumour of an arrest having taken place yesterday in connection with the Whitchapel murder; but, on inquiry of the police authorities this morning, we were informed that there was no truth in the report…

While the coroner's court adjourned for luncheon this afternoon, our representative again visited the scene of the murder, where crowds of persons were still congregated, gazing at the place with a morbid interest. Mr. William Perkins, of Essex Wharf, father of the young man whose statement has already been given, states that at three o'clock his daughter opened the bedroom window of the house where they live - only twelve feet from where the deceased woman was discovered, and there was then the greatest stillness…

**Murder As a Fine Art**

The crimes of ferocity recently committed in Whitechapel are similar to those which terrified the East-end nearly eighty years ago. The murders in Ratcliffe-highway, which alarmed London in the winter of 1812, are described with cunning hand in the postscript to De Quincey's essay, "Murder as a Fine Art." In the blood-thirstiness of the deeds, in the rapidity of succession, in the curious working around the same limited period, there will be found many points of resemblance between the recent deeds in Whitechapel and the exploits of John Williams in Ratcliffe-highway...

Up to half-past eleven this morning no one had been arrested for the murder of the woman Nicholls. The common lodging-houses in the neighborhood are being carefully guarded night and day, and every place where the suspected criminal may be lurking is watched with equal closeness…

**The Whitechapel Murder**

From inquiries made at a late hour last night, it has been ascertained that no arrests have been effected in connexion with this mystery, but there are reasons to believe that the detectives are possessed of important information…

**Police Report signed John Spratling**

…her throat had been cut from left to right, two different cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through; a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw, also one on left cheek; the abdomen had been cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of stomach, there the wound was jagged; the omentum, or coating of the stomach, was also cut in several places…

**A Revolting Murder Another Woman Found Horribly Mutilated In Whitechapel. Ghastly Crimes By A Maniac.**

In each case the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilation…

* * *

"He's not a maniac," Caroline says to him one evening with her fingers beneath her nose, pacing before the fireplace.

At moments such as these, he is not expected to say anything; Caroline merely requires something tangible for her thoughts to rebound off, but a wall will do as nicely as any flesh and blood. He may conduct himself as he pleases in these moments, except he may not sneeze or scuff his feet or fiddle with his gun, nor touch the books, nor rearrange the correspondence on the mantle. He is, with written notification, permitted to breathe.

He walks over to the bow-window so those few fortunates who chance an upward glance may enjoy his face.

"I mean, he's not a maniac as the public perceives that word. He's a maniac in the way your brother is a maniac. Not some gibbering asylum escapee battling his hallucinatory demons. He's completely normal, on the surface. He probably melts right into the background of Whitechapel after these murders. He's probably a little bit charming; he's approaching these women- there are no signs of struggle. He doesn't chase them down a dark alleyway, he comes to them as a client, he must put them at ease, to subdue them with such little effort. In a time when every client is suspect, when every _man_ who approaches these women is a potential mutilator, this man talks them away into a dark corner and is on them before it can even cross their mind that he could be the murderer. He's not poor. He's not struggling for survival. He has some time on his hands. Probably not a gentleman, one of those wouldn't last five seconds in some of those corners of Whitechapel, but lower middle class, maybe. Sexual murder is this…relatively new phenomenon to society." She gestures with her hands as she paces, not looking at him, but rather off into the distance where the gears of her mind catch on some distant dust speck and here are set smoothly into motion. "We used to spend all our time carving out our own little niche in society. You had to battle every day for your survival. You don't have the time to come up with these fantasies, let alone act on them. Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Bathory- some of the earliest recorded killers who carried out their murders for the sheer pathological joy of it were aristocrats. They had the time, the money, the means. They didn't kill for profit, or revenge, or in self-defense, but because they enjoyed it. That's what this man is doing."

Baker Street puts out a few tendrils of mist as she continues to posit, tentatively, at first; the dogcarts and four wheelers and hansoms are still corporeal, the lamps do not flicker before those autumnal phantoms who raise their dead with unsettled murmurings from the graveyards, and send them at a lively stroll alongside the horses.

"Most of these murders have all taken place after the 19th century. I mean, you had the Sawney-Beane family in the 16th century. And Niklaus Stuller in 1577. And Peter Stubbe in 1589. But the Industrial Revolution- that's when it all really began to boom. That's when more than a privileged few suddenly didn't have to scrape and scrape and scrape every day just for a scrap of bread. So you had Fredrick Baker, a middle-class Englishman, he beheaded a girl, cut her into pieces and took her genitalia. And after him, Joseph Philippe, who also targeted prostitutes, six victims- a man called Gruyo in Spain, also six prostitutions, strangulation, just like our guy here. In 1870, there's a fourteen-year-old girl discovered in a field with her abdomen cut open, her intestines torn out, her genitals nearby. And then in 1871, a woman is strangled and left with her guts hanging out, and what do we know about the perpetrator?"

He rubs a clear spot on the window, where his breath has misted it over.

"22 years old, his name was Vincenzo Verzeni, who said he found 'unspeakable delight' in strangling women, and experienced erections while carrying out the murders. When he was just twelve he discovered the he could get sexual pleasure from wringing the necks of chickens. So this man. This man." She claps her hands beneath her nose once more, and back and forth she goes, back and forth, taking off her hat and tossing it onto the nearest chair. It lands neatly on the armrest.

She carefully circumnavigates the table and the chairs as she walks round and round, lest a stray bump nudge something from its rightful place, keeping up this long and ceaseless babble to herself, and from time to time forgoing the tapping of the fingers beneath the nose in favor of drumming them instead against her mouth.

"Enzo's here," he informs her, waving through the bow-window to the dark-haired man who sprouts suddenly from the mist, and, looking upward, salutes his amiable acknowledgement.

"Shh! No talking."

The bell sounds jauntily, and downstairs the door is whisked open and shut once more and then the heavy boots, finding the creak on the seventh step and with such an announcement not so much as stirring Caroline from her fevered hypothesis, clatter along the landing to their door.

He opens it before Enzo can knock.

"Hello gorge-" he begins, and then cuts himself off, catching sight of the rumpled hair, the knotted hands beneath the chin, all these telltale signs of impending Wrath should man in his clumsy ignorance disturb this breathless monologue. "Are we not talking?" he whispers.

"We're not talking."

They watch her round the table, avoid the chair, touch the mantel with one pale hand.

"Oh!" she calls out suddenly, smacking both hands together before her face, eyes glittering.

He raises an eyebrow.

Enzo stands looking at her with his usual amorous glow; explaining precisely nothing, Caroline hastily knots her hair at the nape of her neck and, rolling up her sleeves, says to him, "Ok; you can punch me now."

Tuesdays Enzo has a standing invitation for tea and boxing. Now with careful supervision are the chairs and the sofa allowed to be pushed aside to clear a space in the middle of the flat where the two can circle one another with their fists up. Caroline fished Enzo out of some benefit at Alison's rooms some two years past, and finding him a patient teacher, has ever since then spent one night a week adding to her repertoire of the violent arts. She hasn't the strength of Enzo, but with a cross-hit once helped a drunken groper in dispensing three of his more wretched teeth while her teacher watched with a smile to rival any proud father's, then assisted the man with the rest of his afterward much-improved face.

He watches them. You don't risk a face like this.

Mrs. Hudson will be in to sqauwk at them in some moments, though with none of the froth his target shooting inspires; 'mind the neighbors while you're tramping round like that!' she'll scold, and then drift away to that mysterious fairyland of Deus Ex Machina where plots appear and disappear at will. Perhaps a bear chases her from this humble stage and beyond into its darkened wings. He lost a brother there once.

For some time Caroline and Enzo sweat and slap at one another while Enzo calls out instructions and the bits of crowing praise which mean she has scored a hit of the disabling variety; it looks like rather nice foreplay, if you ask him. He wonders if that Tim chap likes to be knocked about a bit?

Mrs. Hudson lurks somewhere beyond, putting neither foot nor hair over the threshold as Enzo and Caroline continue to thrash one another. It's rather concerning. She is getting on somewhat in years, after all.

He fires his revolver twice into the back wall.

"Just checking, darling," he says when she comes thundering up the stairs to their door.

" _Kol_!" Caroline wails in the background.

* * *

She strews the Baker Street Irregulars across the East End after this 'Leather Apron' and sends Kol off to the music halls with Enzo as babysitter.

She pores over the inquests, she walks the murder sites once and twice and again; she tumbles every encyclopedia off her shelf and from the last century, two, three she dredges up all the worst acts of this long and fruitful race because he is just. A. Man. Somewhere he left something tangible. Somewhere there is a step, a print, a _hint_.

She does not think about a certain dimpled jerk who keeps up a long and steady stream of telegrams.

Obviously.

* * *

Though man may on the whole judge himself a noble and worthy race, each day his sitting room finds itself privy to a new and varied swarm of petitioners.

Are these the sediment of society, that musty stratum into which all our rubbish is thrown, do we not say to ourselves, looking out over these shabby coats, the sooty hats, the worn and suffering faces which privation has molded with his rough fingers- ah, yes, precisely as I expected?

But then, of course, you are struck by Mrs Abbot's hat. Quite fetching, bit of plume, fashionably tilted.

She would like her husband robbed, and afterward stabbed. Slowly, mind you; she emphasizes that quite strictly, does Mrs Abbot: slowly, dear, so he's time to feel it.

Rather pedestrian, in his opinion; might he offer you a special deal, today only, an 'accidental' decapitation, the artistry of which he is positive would not find itself humbled beside a Bernini?

Half off.

He dimples.

He sketches Caroline as he hears out the rest of these clamoring customers, smudging the coal dust with his fingers to lend the curls their proper luster, and in manipulating the lighting finding himself suddenly struck by the corner of her mouth, which is not so fresh as life, no, there is something wooden in it, something which does not suggest there lives in this humble flesh a breathless laugh, behind the teeth there is the sharp tongue, in these universal features gifted to man by either science or divinity, there is something which transcends the base functions of vulgar speech and animal passion-

"Guvnor?"

He looks up from his paper.

The man who has interrupted him is but a minor player in his organization, a bit of that coarse muscle which even the most gifted must occasionally employ, for the truly nasty work.

He's had one warning already about this sort of transgression.

He picks up the pistol on his table, holding his charcoal in the other hand, and shoots the man in the face.

Two liveried servants collect the man promptly and convey him through a side door.

"What have I said about shooting in the house, Niklaus?" Elijah asks, appearing in the entrance with a book in his hand, and that slightly ruffled brow which indicates true exasperation. "You're as bad as Kol."

"Dismissed," he tells the line before him, and shutting his notebook, whisks off his jacket, saying to one of the nearby help, "The Jack Grady outfit; thank you, mate."

Elijah watches in nauseated silence as he is promptly brought a pair of trousers which have long bid farewell to their prime, a jacket out at the elbows, and some brogans hard as a nut, which must be pounded rather than slipped onto the feet.

His brother attempts to alleviate the worst of this desecration, straightening the shoulders and dusting the trousers with his pocket square, but there is no mere cloth which can restore the threads, and return to these emblems of poverty their factory shine. "Off to pursue your investigation in Whitechapel, I assume?" Elijah asks, setting aside his book

"One can't leave everything to the minions, brother," he says with a wink, and, clapping Elijah heartily on the shoulder, goes off whistling into the hall.

* * *

In casting off his purple cloak, man divests himself not merely of his finery, but his title as well. Gone, the mincing. Gone, the gibbering salutations of the worker to his superior. Gone, that silence in which society kneels when this superior passes overhead, rendering his chatter inane. There is a whole language to which the aristocracy is not privy; feeling in himself the gilded limbs, the untainted blood, he recognizes so too must his views and his extrapolations emerge similarly Midas-blessed. And what has this underlayer to offer- muddied to his knees, with soot in his hair, illiterate, and having spent his last shilling on his beer, are his opinions to be weighted in the same scale, must we consider his views with equal consideration when he's no Dante in his heart, when he can barely speak English never mind Greek, when in his simple scrabble for just a few more years he has worn himself beyond his youth, when all the mechanisms of his intellect, like the unwound clock, have frozen with the hands mid-circuit- no.

And so Lord Breverton may take himself slumming, and risk his pocket watch in the long avenues of the ill-bred, but he may never know their hearts. So does the peasant rise up and seize his king by the throat as he sips his frosty lemonade.

He joins this sea of disheveled worker caps, and is absorbed. Out at the elbow, with his knees patched, his hair dirtied, his nails broken, he is merely one more little swell in this listless wave, which goes about on foot, and for a penny catches at the bridles of the gentlemen. He has transitioned from 'sir' to 'mate'. In crossing the thoroughfares, he must now dart rather than strut; in his dinner jacket he is a customer, in his rags a target.

But in descending through these circles, in coming, at last, to this final perdition, the mighty East End, which the newspapers sketch in hushed whispers, and in painting its factories and public houses employ the same dark brush, strewing in its wake every conceivable nightmare, he has opened before himself a world to which neither the gentleman nor the bobby is revealed. The gentlemen watches from his hansom as he might view _La Forêt enchantée_ through his binoculars, and in so putting between himself this layer, inoculates himself; he sees as in a mist, that pleasant bluntness of patrician distance: he notices neither the dancer's strain, nor her sweat; he sees not the worker's bleeding fingers.

And here the strange Babel of tongues which have never tasted foreign prints, but pass, instead, their own coarse version from mother to babe where you may find a rude beauty as in the crudest of any unloved pebble, found and kicked aside by the plows.

This the gentleman misses as he trots past with a vague welling of sympathy, straightening his cuff links.

However, in plunging into the center of it, in taking it up yourself, in feeling its strange texture on your tongue and suffering your nostrils' slow anosmia, you will find that countries do not turn on their politicians, they are not powered by the mighty, they are carried on the shoulders of these grim employees, who bear and are sometimes crushed beneath these burdens. Here, from the bottom, at the root, is where the first waters are drunk, then, and from there this nourishment finds its way to the crown, where burst all its jeweled rewards.

It is here you will find your intrepid murderer.

The sun sits steady at one o'clock; already ragged men and women are beginning to queue for the workhouses. For a man to seek his bed at seven sharp is too late; he must line up the afternoon before, properly destitute, with less than four pence in his pocket, with longer expression than his neighbor, and more holes in his trousers.

In the worst avenues, where the sludge is darkest, and the children leanest, men can be found scrounging in the gutters for wizened apple cores blackened to anonymous lumps by manure and boots; what his more fortunate companions have thrown aside he eats thirstily: the rinds, the pits, all those superfluous remains which with fortune in your pocket you have the privilege to bin and pass merrily on.

But in wandering farther you find these social reformers with their upraised arms and their shouts to outdo the rest have exaggerated; they have put before your eyes the horrors of every Dickensian wretch; they have painted over the cobblestones with sewage, filled the ditches with dead, erased the omnibuses, the tram cars, the railway stations: they have built in their stead a Hades, and at its gates no simple Cerberus, but those expiring creatures whose mothers have unlatched them from their breasts, and thrown them helpless into the streets.

Yet on your right you see the Aldgate Meat Market, and the butcher's hooks, the waggons which creak beneath their hides: now here you pass on, and come to the book stalls, and farther still the second-hand book shops, light, literacy: someone has torn the veil between earth and hell, they have shone that great lamp the sun into all the corners of Purgatory, and into its suffering hand put Voltaire.

He listens to everything around him, to the workers and middle class alike, to the man cracking plum pits between his teeth and the woman rifling Blair's Sermons. Somewhere between destitution and prosperity this man has slipped, playing at either one.

In such dress he may pop into any of the public houses and choose to quietly observe, or knock elbows with every tattered riff-raff.

Engage the bartender of any establishment and you will find in him riches an encyclopedia could not lay before you, but this man has no elaborations to make upon 'Leather Apron'. He is a shade; and all the whores have sketched him in different lights. He is simultaneously tall, stunted, fat, emaciated; blonde-haired, brown-haired, red-haired. There is a lameness to his right leg, his left; he is as fleet-footed as any pink youth.

He swings round to the various different hidey-holes which are scattered throughout Whitechapel to check his messages and quiz his various sentries, who have seen nothing.

Crimes are not committed in London without his knowledge; most of them must have his express permission.

This bit of flesh and blood, this insignificant, this _outsider_ who dares to lower his shoulder to the likes of himself-

He shuts his eyes.

Alone in the room of a shabby lodging house which is hardly larger than his thumbnail, and certainly smaller than Bekah's closet, he sits on the edge of Jack Grady's monastic bed with his fingers beneath his chin.

Next door the O'Connell brats are at it again; mother bellows from the bottom of her stout bosom; bloody murder is threatened no less than three times.

In the chronicles of history, crime, and in particular, murder, have many a commendable entry for your indignation (none so appallingly impressive as his own, though, he assures you). There was that de Rais chap, of course; our delectable Countess Bathory, Nicklaus Stuller, Peter Stubbe; a whole spotty array of sexual perversion which, toddling on its infant legs in those uncertain periods of pre-middle class toil, have now in the 19th begun to become, if not commonplace, certainly more widely remarked.

And along comes this lad, on the heels of The Monster, and Alton's Fredrick Baker, noteworthy specimens of England's especial depravity. You may put a stick up your backsides, mates, and hide your flogging in the brothels, but so too will your barbarity out.

He takes a notebook from beneath a loose floorboard, and skims its coded entries.

For nearly a week he has put up his ears and stretched out his many arms into all the side streets and back alleys of Whitechapel, and for his troubles, he has a clutch of rumors, whispers, those darting peripheral flashes of the spooked streetwalker.

'Jack Grady' has wandered from one end of Whitechapel to the other, and spotted only its usual offences. The usual soot has settled in his collar, and the familiar slag crept over his boot tops; in his hair nestle all the standard pollutions of industry and humanity.

Somewhere there is another man, of slightly higher standing, who has the freedom to develop his propensities, who strolls the district unnoticed, who is neither gentleman nor wretch, who makes his way on foot, by the streets, who has not soiled his trousers in the gutters, who perhaps has even an extra bit of bob for the omnibus, who slips by skill or luck these snares which he has laid, who sidles just out of Caroline's fingers, who treads these pavements soundlessly, sans humanity's usual bread trail.

He drums his fingers on the notebook, frowning.

Briskly, he makes another notation with the stub of pencil in his pocket, and snaps the cover shut.

Let's check in on our ravishing detective, then, shall we?

* * *

Sometimes you feel a tingling on the back of your neck, and for you that means to turn around, to squint into the darkness, to walk a little faster.

For her that means opening the door to her apartment and finding in her favorite chair his smirking face, staring back at her.

"How did you get in here?" she demands, shutting the door behind her. Kol is downstairs paying the hansom driver; there's this heaviness in the air, where there ought to be other lives insinuating themselves, but all down the hall is silence, a great snowed-in thing which presses in from the outside, and here in this hollow just the sound of his breathing. "I told Mrs. Hudson not to let you in."

"The landlady? She seemed quite charmed by me. I imagine I have somewhat more freedom to come and go than you would perhaps prefer." He pauses for a moment, waiting for her to contradict him.

She crosses her arms over her chest.

He likes to lick his lips before he says something. He can't just say it: there has to be a pause, there has to be a waiting, all the world must have bent their ear to his genius, and with bated breath grovel for his insight.

"How goes the investigation?" He lifts one eyebrow innocently.

She slips over to the window, not turning her back to him, and glances down onto the street to determine where Kol is at in his negotiations.

He's leaning on the cabbie box with his patented drop-your-drawers-it's-worth-it smile, which means there is at least a 70% chance he'll leave with the driver and drag himself in somewhere between Do You Know What Time It Is and noon. Freaking wonderful.

She spins around and clasps her hands behind her back. "That's my business, not yours."

"As we both know you've already tracked my day's activities down to the very street by my sleeves, I'll spare you the details and say instead what we're both thinking: rather slippery chap, isn't he?" He doesn't even blink, looking at her. He moves his eyebrows as he talks, and gestures with his hands, he employs all these various little flourishes meant to draw every last eye, but he doesn't look away from her.

You can feel him pulling stuff from the very bones of you.

"I have some theories," she says, a bit stung.

"I don't doubt it. But theories won't run this man to ground, no, not him; you need something more. You've spun some vague profile in your head, you've the outline of this man, but his minutiae- those you haven't sorted."

She can sense a proposal. His lips are knowing. His hands have tented beneath his nose and now his scrutiny narrows further, you could take off every modest layer, down to her last petticoat, and she wouldn't feel more naked.

Kol is still talking with the driver.

"You know," he says, casually, purposefully casually, so that you know he's spent the last three hours mulling it over in his head, but he can't be seen to think, he has to have everything at his fingertips, it must just come to him, he has to have already on his tongue all the retorts to every question of man, and all the schemes that ever were he has already countered, check and mate, just by sitting in this chair and stirring his pinkie finger this has all leaped to full and crystallized reality, he has made it Be.

And on the seventh day he created Light, yadda yadda.

"Sitting in one's flat in Baker Street isn't terribly conducive to the investigation of such a case as this, wouldn't you agree? This man slips in and out of Whitechapel at will while you sit here before your fire spinning hypotheses to impress my brother. Wouldn't it be more useful, say, to be right in the midst of it, hearing each fresh report as it leaves the lips of the prostitutes, walking, living, where this man has tread? You must know, of course, that he is either a resident of Whitechapel or has established a den in its midst."

"Of course."

"I have a flat in Whitechapel. Actually, I have several, one can never have too many-"

She cuts him off. "So do I. You can put your penis away; I'm not matching Evil Villain Lairs against one another. I'm pretty sure you'll win that one. And also, let me just see if I can 'hypothesize' what you're about to suggest, which is that you and I take an apartment in Whitechapel, together. Where I will be sleeping alone, with a mass murderer."

"With excellent table manners." He smiles.

"No."

He sighs; not like he's disappointed; as if he expected no better than this kind of nonsense from the peons. "Two extraordinary heads are better than one, wouldn't you agree, love?"

She doesn't correct the nickname; he'd enjoy that. "I've already got something up my sleeve that doesn't involve me probably being strangled in my sleep, thank you."

"Not an opponent such as yourself, sweetheart; I have more respect for your abilities than that. I'd strangle you whilst you were looking right at me; you'd have every chance at a proper retaliation, I assure you."

"That inspires a lot of confidence in sharing a room with you. Thank you, but I'm going to have to go with 'no'. A resounding no. And now you can see yourself out."

He does get up obediently enough.

She doesn't like the way he looks at her. Under his dirty cap he is somehow softer, more pitiable, closer to a man. He has two days of stubble on his face, and a bit of coal dust on his cheek.

And under his fingernails: still the charcoal, still the tracks of his art along his thumb and middle finger, some permanent part of him he has opened to her inspection and never stored away.

"Good evening, Caroline," he says softly, with some meaning in it she doesn't want to ponder.

She listens to him greet his brother on the stairs.

* * *

On the evening of the seventh she gathers all the boys, and lines them up in her living room.

"Can you guys be women?" she asks.

"I don't see why not," Enzo replies.

"Darling, do you really have to ask?" Kol drawls.

"Em," Tim contributes.

But her eyes are already roving down the line, down to this behemoth standing at its end, his hat sticking up nearly half a foot above the rest, lean, but with those dock laborer's muscles Kol keeps staring at, and the forearms she can hide beneath some sleeves, and the shoulders which she cannot. "I could use some stage tricks, maybe have you crouch a little when you walk, hunch your shoulders, but there's only so much I can do, it's not like we can just- throw a tent-y dress over all this," she sweeps her arm up and down to indicate Tim's whole body, "and suddenly you're a 5' 6", middle-aged prostitute anyone would love to stab-"

"Listen, gorgeous," Enzo interrupts. "You're going to need to elaborate a bit for those of us who aren't as quick on the uptake."

"Right." She claps her hands together and beams at them all. "I'm going to disguise myself as a prostitute and you're coming with me. At first I thought, we'll all be prostitutes, it's three times the bait of just lil' ol' me, but he's too tall."

"Sorry," Tim says.

"So! Here's what we do. We split into teams of doubles, two of us will be prostitutes, Tim and whichever of you don't come with me will be clients."

"I'll be a client," Kol volunteers instantly.

"The 'clients' will walk the streets I assign to them. Enzo and I will operate as bait in Spitalfields. Everyone stays within shouting distance of one another. We keep our eyes out for anything suspicious, anything strange, anybody who has that sort of shifty I-just-can't-wait-to-mutilate-a-prostitute look to them."

"Simple enough. I imagine most mutilators advertise that sort of thing," Kol says, staring at Tim's ass.

"Don't be sarcastic. And stop looking at his butt."

Tim turns bright red and starts to emit something which she supposes are to be taken as words, and she pauses, she turns a little toward him, she says, "Uh…I actually was talking to Kol, not you."

He snaps his mouth shut and turns even redder.

Kol looks so incredibly pleased with himself that she takes a moment from her instructions to roll her eyes, and then collecting herself, she strolls on, back and forth down the line, rattling off assignments, and in her head calculating all those changes of cheekbone and jaw line which must be transformed in Enzo, the stubble shaved, the chin softened, and around the eyes those hardships of the street which any middle-aged streetwalker bears with weary indignation.

She whisks Enzo away into her bedroom for his makeup.

She throws open the wardrobe to consult her color-coded wigs. "Is that Tim laughing?"

"He does that occasionally," Enzo replies, lounging back on her bed and from his pocket taking a packet of roasted peanuts. "And Kol could make the Thames talk to him, if he liked. And have sex with him, probably. That poor giant bastard doesn't have a chance." He rips open the packet, and rustles one big heap into his mouth.

"No crumbs on the bed!" she scolds, but absentmindedly, rifling the wigs, and in her mind matching the undertone of his skin to each synthetic strand, tilting her head this way and that, and to the sitting room and its muffled dialogue closing her ears. "Hmmm…I think…a dirty blonde."

"Whatever you say, gorgeous."

* * *

_Already at eight o'clock London has begun its transformation; the lamps have not yet been lit, the sun, still drowsing over the Thames, has not yet ceded its ground: but here the intermission, when behind the curtain there drifts that mysterious shuffling of the scenery, undergoing its metamorphosis._

_By day a man knows what he is about; perhaps the Devil may still touch him, but he leaps from unexpected corners, he takes the gentleman unawares, and leaves him dying in the sun._

_Here he lurks in this miasma from which slithers every dark being who cannot weather the light, no matter how porous his belly._

_By day London, and even the nefarious Whitechapel, in these contemporary times and then, in the autumn of 1888, laboring even under the fearsome reign of that invisible tyrant, frightened at the thought of letting its ladies loose into the streets, crystallized in this strange forewarning of battle, when Father Death has loosed his rime over the soldiers, was no vermicular carnival, secreting in its every back alley its tuppenny freaks._

_But what nightmares the sun melts the moon once more snows down onto the unassuming masses; there is in every alley some unfathomable horror; where merely two hours before we tread lightly, we now circumvent; the gas lamps throw behind us that elusive evil, the shadow, which at high noon escorts and at midnight pursues._

_Now the beggars, having feasted all day on the scraps of their hope, and come wailing to the very end of it, leap with outstretched hands toward those with even the shabbiest of overcoats. He who has any overcoat is a God; hurled, perhaps, from Olympus' mighty peak, and with Jupiter's wrath at his heels, but if somewhat dinged there is nevertheless an aureole round his head._

_The prostitutes are after their first shillings: to the pubs these initial pennies, to their beds the final, which are gathered with the morning frosts, when the city has once more cracked its slumbering eye._

_September 7 is pleasantly mild; a lady might be tempted to strip off that eternal divider of class, the glove. Whitechapel hovers still between its daytime façade and that which the more sensationalist articles have awarded it. Here shabby middle-class meets underworld ooze: there at the edge of the pavement you may see them commingling, tentatively at first, while the sun has not forgotten its long and prosperous reign._

_But the poor are of notice only to themselves; once can be appalled only so many times. You have seen already the men eating apples from the gutters; you have mourned and moved on. Man was not meant to bear the griefs of his brothers; it upsets his stomach. And have we not thrown our taxes at it, have we not made our brief rumblings at Parliament, and subsided back into our tea? In penetrating into the wretch's lair, we see not him, but rather his pestilent milieu, the rotten shoring-beams which support his house, and the rags which clothe his limbs, we the privileged are left, not with the stamp of his dark and beleaguered soul on our hearts, but the visceral stench of his underarms, and the lice which teem in merry boiling upon his homey head. Is it the illiterate's Cockney mumblings which sell editions, do we rustle open the latest Star to see him masticate our grammar, and tug with dirty fingers at our freshly-polished heartstrings? No._

_Rather it is the silver-penned Dickenses of the world who with metaphors aloft smooth the raw edges of this malodourous sewer where London has washed all its worst sins._

_So too has the reader come to experience London's most desolate, but from the comfort of his bed, and in company of a gilt tongue._

_I may oblige; in writing truly, we must cast aside all modesties, be they false or factual. The heart must be the inkwell, and the intellect its conduit. If I may be of any assistance to Him, it is in molding a narrative which is somehow worthy of His exploits, though few are those living who can with mortal pen and parchment hope to convey the astonishing machinations of Fate which he turns as deftly as any simple miller's wheel._

_But it is not to Him I now guide you; we are bound for other plots. His movements at this hour of September 7th are vital, of course, but not yet for lesser eyes._

_Contemporary readers will appreciate the significance of this date, but on that evening itself, Whitechapel, having flinched from its nape the prickling of this unseen murderer, and going about in the presence of an increased police force felt, if not safe, at least returned to its usual course of business. Hunger and Pestilence having reared their heads once more as the East End's most resilient threats, the inhabitants have now gone cheerfully back to their garroting. Down any number of alleys you may see the more well-dressed of the pedestrians set upon by gangs of broad-shouldered men, who employ their choke-holds swiftly and skillfully, and, having deprived their victim of his pockets, now gallop off to future heists._

_In these early hours, the shopkeepers and their children are still about, and in that middle-class opulence bloom amongst their more ragged neighbours. The most garish of the ladies chat loudly as they make their way amongst the crowds, eyeing those men who stand out as their likeliest marks. The shadows which will later manifest in their mysterious depths every evil known and unknown to man have yet to materialize; your pocket being in dire peril, your throat is probably yet untouchable._

_Among these unfortunate women, there is one, though her dress be plainer, and her cheeks spotted with pox, who stands above the rest: mere plaster, regardless of its seamless application, cannot conceal her. The hair she has left untouched, down around her shoulders: a man will overlook any number of pox scars for curls like those._

_Caroline Forbes, in company of a stout woman some inches taller than her, moves off into Spitalfields, taking with her any number of interested looks: in her there is a vitality which neither pox nor rag can dim._

_She is alert to everything; one can see (if one knows how to look), the slight pressure which thought has pressed upon the brow; hardly does she wrinkle her forehead, and yet there is beneath it a whole storm of observations, each vying with the other, and cancelling themselves out, those with more weight ousting their less significant forefathers, and taking their spots in those lists which she transposes over every man, woman, and child, and which reveal their every tic. To view the world through her eyes is to trace a man to the very lodging house from which he has sprung, and the last pub at which he has watered._

_In all his centuries, God has crafted only one brain to equal hers: and society clamors that he has wasted it, putting it into a woman._

_Society, being run by any number of dull-witted men, with jowls far more expansive than their intellects, bristles at any suggestion of feminine superiority. Dare the interloper challenge his long-established supremacy? He has built this girth as any noble with a right to his cigar: in those gentleman's clubs which assure him here on his throne, where he sits above the mud, above the smog, where he is entirely out of touch with every stratum of society which has not climbed over the heads of its dying to the uppermost tier, he knows this city to its struts, he comprehends every political gradation, and has with this interminable Right which God has granted to him in reward for his bloodline's long and incestuous service the ability to judge every last and lowest worm._

_Two men, one of which you have earlier encountered during that Birlstone business, stop to talk to Caroline and her companion. The other will have no small part in the narrative of Kol Mikaelson at a later date, but on this night, he is still nearly a stranger: I will not linger on him. A common dock worker, hardly of any significance, but for his sticky fingers where brothers are concerned, born to common parents, in some middling Irish district. It is one of the great pities of our always unjust world that He could not imbue Kol with His own faultless taste. He always was consorting with lessers, poor Kol._

_The gas lamps are now being lighted; one by one they pop on as the Thames proceeds with its nightly drowning of the sun._

_When those rays are snuffed, so commences our second act._

_You see the more well-dressed pedestrians begin to disappear. Each long hour is followed by one longer still; here winter with ambitious foresight sows her deadly frosts._

_Our two groups have separated; the men wander off toward distant side alleys, Caroline and the unknown woman pursue the broader main streets. The entrances to many of these alleyways are no wider than a door, and in some places, the man to whom we will not give a name, being of the side character class for which readers do not care, is obliged to turn sideways, to fit his shoulders into the passage. Kol fares little better. In following their maneuvers (and drowning out their idle chatter), you see how our elusive murderer moves among the constables, missing and sidestepping them with nary a whispered suspicion._

_Somewhere remote clocks chime their masters away to bed, and children are put yawning into their cradles._

_Crass midnight has passed, when the whores still bellow after their drunken clients, and rustle their yet unwilted feathers: all these merry expulsions of the pubs, which shove their drunkards out with their rubbish, have at this hour long faded away. Arise ye, vile gutter beasts: the gong has struck your hour._

_Where, you may demand, is He at this historic moment?_

_All in good time, fair reader._

_One mustn't muss their entrance by making it too early, hmm?_

* * *

Tim talks rarely, but he finds there are some topics which immediately prod him to long and blistering commentary. These are, in the following order of importance: Ireland, Dickens, and people who litter.

One does wonder how he walks these cluttered alleys and still has pearls remaining to clutch.

Caroline and Enzo (whom it must be noted he would not now fuck with Nik's cock) have melted off somewhere to the left. The fog, being imbued with that human necessity for drama (perhaps Nik has had it piped in from somewhere), builds a solid wall between them and the various branching side streets which Caroline has ordered them to watch minutely. At this hour, only Spitalfield's most desperate are still stumbling along in the cold.

Tim smokes with the collar of his coat turned up, trailing a long cloud after him. In the damp they press their shoulders against one another; he quite by chance (he's absolutely uncertain how he's made such a slip) feels up Tim's bicep. If inquiring minds would like to know, it's very firm.

"'Great Expectations' was a whole lot of dreary rubbish," he says, just to listen to Tim talk. He has a nice voice; soft, and with all the 'ths' sanded out of his accent. A voice which might lull you to long and peaceful sleep, or politely inquire after a spanking.

The gas lamps do not reach into some of the corners they pass, and for a moment the eyes insist there is in each of these corners all manner of apparitions: when you've the sand of an entire twenty-four hours blunting the peripheral vision, and muddying each blink, you notice every lost spirit which hunger (and yourself; let's not waste our time with modesties, darlings) has sent in dry whisperings along the streets. It's nearly a sound of leaves or rubbish, crawling about under the mist: but not quite.

"And do you really think he's out here?" Tim asks, putting out his cigarette. "Perhaps he's done?"

"Are you spooked?" he replies, bumping Tim's shoulder a little, and smiling up at him.

"No. A little," he admits, and laughs. "But mostly the wind's after freezing the bollocks off me."

"I could warm them up if you like," he offers, and Tim turns red all the way to the tips of his ears.

It isn't a 'no'.

For some moments they walk on in silence; not an entirely uncomfortable one. Somewhere is a distant burst of laughter. From Tim there is the rapid click click clicking of the pocket watch which occupies his long-fingered hands (he must have an excellent grip), and the steady mist blossoming at each fresh breath.

"Why'd you come to London?"

"Hmm?" Tim asks, rousing himself from some distant musing, and looking down at him from an angle, so the long lashes stand out against his pale cheek.

"From a small Irish town to an English metropolis? Isn't there some story there?"

"Chasing work," he says. And then: "Me mother died." He says it as if it's something fresh, something he hasn't yet patched over: but then perhaps men like this never quite patch anything over. They have not yet learned to put away their wounds, and snap at every kind hand.

"And then Caroline found you."

"And then Caroline found me. Down at the docks. She was dressed like a sailor; all blond wisp and scream. She says to me, you're tall: I like people who can reach things. Would you like a job?" Tim laughs; he's rather concerned by how much he likes it. He'll need to watch that round Nik.

"And so then you-" he begins, but suddenly Tim grabs his arm. Yes, darling- and now throw him into the wall; but in a moment he sees what's distracted Tim's attention. Some yards away, at the junction to another alley, a man has just approached a woman, one of the downfallen which are the only sorts of women Whitechapel sees at this hour; scrounging for her last few pennies, no doubt.

They quicken their pace a bit; Tim has not let go of his arm.

From this distance, nothing is discernible of their conversation; it could be any number of salacious transactions. "We'll just have a nice casual stroll past. If he takes her down the alley, we'll step down after them. They'll think we're only after a private spot for ourselves," he tells Tim.

"Have you a gun?" Tim asks.

"Three, actually."

" _Three_?"

"You just never know, darling. Also, it's integral to carry multiple calibers. Do you need a large hole that's going to stop them immediately, or something small for them to suffer over?"

Tim opens his coat to reveal two pistols, one rigged to either side of his ribcage, so that each hangs down just beneath his armpit. "I've another in me boot."

They look at one another for a moment.

He may be in love.

And then the man reaches out to seize the woman by her hair, and yanks her back into the alley.

* * *

Somehow she's separated from Enzo.

In the fog her senses are momentarily confused.

But here, breathe, breathe: you hear all that silence for miles down the streets and into the far-away harbor with its lowing tower. Two men have passed recently through this side street, one half a foot taller than his companion, and with a lame right foot. He ate three crusts of bread, and wiped his fingers twice on the wall.

She breathes.

She breathes.

There are no distant footsteps behind her, dogging her into the fog where, plunging into its midst, she is suddenly marooned.

The fog horn has gone.

Into all the near and distant corridors she hears this emptiness; an inexplicable sound, which neither poet nor reason can touch. We can chase absence through all the verse that ever stood against it, and never comprehend its reach.

She walks a little faster.

The shawl itches against her neck; she can feel her hands sweating where she clutches the edges of it.

She turns a corner.

Her own footsteps trip one by hollow trap after her, and she thinks: no.

No.

Not her own feet.

There is an irregular pattern to them, in the brief spaces between her own heels clicking against the cobblestones there is a softer sound, more muted, these are not pointed soles, but something flatter, with a nick in the left heel, these are footsteps which slightly favor the left side, the dominant side, the stride indicates medium height, each touches the ground with just enough force to suggest a slender frame, not slight- not a man who labors for his earnings, not an invalid: something squarely in-between.

She turns again.

She can taste her heart in her throat.

One more corner, to where she can put a wall at her back, and wait with cane in hand, slowing her breathing just as Enzo taught her, in through the nose, out, out-

And a man springs up suddenly from the shadows.

* * *

He has to lengthen his stride rather dramatically to keep up with Tim as they sprint down the street.

The woman has muddled her attacker's plan by shrieking continuously and slapping at him with both hands; he has lost hold of her momentarily, and she runs back into the main street, still wailing.

He sees them both charging full-tilt at him, and leaving the woman, now turns to flee into the alley. There's nothing distinguishable about him from here. Dark-haired chap, with a cap pulled over his eyes, and in a long coat; whether or not he's the proper shiftiness he couldn't tell you; having consorted with a fair number of shifty characters in his twenty-three years, they've all blurred together a bit for him.

Tim grabs the woman by the elbows, a controlled sort of crash, during which she is spun to the side as Tim asks, "You ok, ma'am?" and then left convulsively weeping on the pavement, with Tim's coat tossed hastily round her shoulders.

They swerve into the alley.

"Well, don't shoot him," Tim says when he takes out his gun. "If you've killed him before Caroline's the chance to talk to him, she'll shoot you right back."

"I was only going to kneecap him." There's always someone who has to ruin it for everyone.

He puts his gun away.

Caroline aims quite low.

The man's collar is snagged by Tim, who jerks him backward, half off his feet; "Don't struggle, or you'll get it," Tim informs him breathlessly, and by way of response, the man stabs him in the right side.

* * *

She darts her hand out for his throat, and he grabs her by the wrist.

* * *

"You fecking cunt," Tim says, almost politely, hardly even raising his voice, and slams the man's head into the wall.

Another thorough smacking of his face against the brick and he looses the knife; he slides down between them to lie crying in the mud. "You've killed me! You've killed me, you bloody bastard!"

"Listen, darling," he says, kneeling beside the man. "Quick question, and then we'll be on our way. You weren't dragging that woman off to murder and mutilate her, were you? Now, please think carefully about how you answer my question. It irritates me when people lie to me, because then I have to bring back false information to Caroline, and then she's angry, and I don't have to tell you what that's like to live with. I won't be able to move the furniture for weeks. I mean, you can, of course, but then there's mandatory lectures to attend, and she won't let you sleep in past six o'clock, and every time you try to bring home cocaine, she finds it instantly and disposes of it before you're quite out of your hangover."

Tim has squatted down on his heels on the other side of the man; he's not overly fussed with his wound, which means he's only a scratch then, and no one need have all their teeth pulled out. "Jaysus, you can run on."

"You should see what else I can do with my tongue."

He doesn't turn quite as pink this time; apparently physical assault brings out the flirt in him. He likes that in a man. Probably he doesn't mind a little aggressive choking; he'll ask Caroline later. Surely she conducts a thorough background check of all her employees.

"Obviously you don't run with decent people, so I assume the name Mikaelson means something to you? Particularly Kol Mikaelson? Nik likes to take all the credit, but I think most of us are well aware who's the handsomest and least sane of them all."

Excellent, darling; he notes by your pallor you are in fact well-versed in his exploits. He does worry about Nik eclipsing him; his brother's head is a bit bloated, tends to block out most of London and throw over his own considerable crimes a long and infuriating shadow.

"Please don't hurt me," the man pleads.

He looks up at Tim, licking his lips. "You're a little turned on, aren't you? I know I am. Say it again, darling. You don't want me to do what I've done to so many before you, do you? No? You've got to ask nicely, then. You've already stabbed one of us; that's not starting off on a very mannerly foot."

* * *

" _Klaus_?" she says.

He tilts his head a little. "By the throat, sweetheart, really? You don't think that's a bit risky, against a larger opponent?"

"The throat's an easy target: it's soft, easily reachable; it takes just a little pressure to cut off the airflow, and requires hardly any grip strength. The first instinct is panic when you can't breathe; the second is to breathe. So then while they're distracted trying to accomplish the second, you hit them really hard in the face with this." She holds up her cane. "Which I'm about to do in half a second if you don't explain to me why you're freaking creeping after me at four o'clock in the morning in an area being stalked by a freaky sex torture murderer who I'm still, by the way, not entirely sure isn't you."

He lifts one eyebrow innocently. "Just out for an evening stroll."

"So you're stalking me."

"Let's not call it that; bit ugly, wouldn't you say, love? Let's say instead, admiring from afar, shall we? Perhaps I'm studying your methodology so that I might easier dodge it in future? I am the most brilliant criminal of every generation, after all. A true Napoleon of crime, you might say, although he was a bit overrated, if you ask me, and I think neither of us would dare to insult the intelligence of the other by suggesting the same of me."

Oh woooow this man. This man. She speaks three languages and by means of Kol, who speaks nine, has expanded her vocabulary of the ego-mangling variety to a tidy twelve, and in none of them does there exist the means by which to express how completely _infuriating_ he is.

And another thing.

She hates his face.

She hates every last freaking _corner_ of it from the dimple on the left, slightly deeper, all the way to the curl that falls in lazy acquiescence to his Evil But With Style casual Satan chic, and if he thinks for one freaking moment-

"I've found something I think you might want to take a look at," he tells her, and then from the roof above them, Enzo comes sailing down, straight onto Klaus' head.

* * *

"He's me ex-husband," the woman with Tim's coat still round her shoulders says, puffing along the alley after them, having now thrown off her shock and pinched some of the colour back into her cheeks. "He's me ex-husband. He's only after a bit of bob is all, the git."

"Well, this is awkward," he says. "Sorry about those fingernails, darling; they do grow back. The rib you'll probably need to see a doctor about."

* * *

Mr. Evil Overlord, Ruler of Hell, Hades, and Niflheim, nearly faceplants.

Enzo saves him from this indignity by punching him into the wall.

She gets one quick glimpse of Klaus' face, absolutely white, and then they're all over each other, shoving, hitting, brawling right out into the street, where the fog alternatively swallows and regurgitates them once more.

For a moment she thinks Enzo has the upper hand. They're almost the same height, but Enzo is broader, more imposing, he has a right hook like nothing she's ever seen; it once brought down a 6' 6" Russian and his shotgun, and surely can handle one 5' 10" aristocrat.

But she remembers the incandescent rage, and how he threw her down in that chair like he could pick her up over his head, and throw her for eons and eons, and hardly ripple his shoulder muscles.

She puts herself between them.

"Stop. _Stop_ ," she says, and is by someone unseen thrown right back out of their fight, stumbling against the building to her right.

She lifts her cane and wades back in.

"I. Said. _Stop_ ," she demands, lashing out left and right with it, here striking a hand, there a leg, flailing about in this thick white curtain where limbs are brandished and suddenly withdrawn as if disembodied, and all the while they are still _punching each other_ , right out of her reach and into a clear patch, where she suddenly sees Klaus, his face completely contorted by rage, seize Enzo by the throat.

He presses down until Enzo is on his knees, and she thinks for just a second, oh God, oh God, here it is.

She lays her hand on his chest.

"Don't. Touch. Him," she says, and it stops him. Probably not many things can.

But for a second he looks from her to Enzo and back again, all the gears in his mind turning over, clicking back from cave to civilization, and for this one moment he deliberates, cocking his head as any cat over its mouse, and determining whether to consume or let loose.

And then he lets go.

Enzo spits blood at his feet, smirking up through a cut in his lip.

"He's not a murderer. Well, not the one we're looking for. Probably. Anyway, he's not here to murder me."

"I sorted that about ten seconds in, gorgeous. He's just got a very punchable face." It's disconcerting hearing his real voice from the painted lips.

"Who is this?" Klaus snarls.

Enzo smiles up at him. She doesn't like that smile; it means he could not be any less concerned with a man's societal standing or present state of armament. "Lorenzo St. John at your service, mate."

Some understanding washes over Klaus' face. She hasn't dropped her hand from his chest; she can feel how the muscles shift under it (there are most definitely not a noticeable lot of them), and so she brings around the walking stick within aiming range once more, in case he decides to lunge. "Do you two know each other?"

"We served in the army together, back in our youth. Not for very long; I believe we only had a year together, but what a year it was, yeah?"

Klaus' nostrils flare. "This is who you choose to associate with, sweetheart? Might I suggest dragging the gutters round Bethnal-green for something far worthier?"

She cops one of the sighs Kol uses when she has just confiscated his drugs, or told him he can't have sex in her bed. "Ok. So. Back to why you were creeping after me in that alleyway? What do you have to show me?"

He holds his staring contest with Enzo for one more prolonged moment; she gets two good revolutions out of her eye roll before he can be bothered to stop impressing upon everyone the magnitude of his squintiest glower.

"Another woman's been murdered," he says at last, and she drops her hand.

* * *

At the bottom and to the left of the stairs which lead into the yard of 29 Hanover Street, parallel to the fence bisecting Nos. 29 and 27, there is a woman's body.

Two feet from the back wall of the house, and eight inches from the steps.

She is lying on her back, legs pulled up, and her skirts tossed over the knees: left arm on the left breast, the right stretched along the right side.

Enzo has been sent to find Kol and Tim, leaving just her and Klaus alone in this yard which dawn has not yet touched, and the gas lights grope after but cannot access. There is such a stillness here: in every 4 a.m. nook, there is some fleeting life, where mortality if widespread is at least not omniscient.

But what she hears in the lodging, in the adjoining yard, in the streets, the harbors, the thoroughfares- just the calm and even breathing beside her. She wants to touch him. Not because he deserves it, not because she's frightened, she needs a man, in her frail and womanly arms there is not the strength to bolster herself- no.

You just…want to remember: there are people, and they have such warmth in them.

She looks at the woman's face first, because you can do that for them: you can put aside your reason, just for a moment, just to acknowledge, they once were a daughter, and they had love around them.

And then she says, "Ok. Did you see anything?"

"'Fraid not. I cut through the yard and stumbled across her like this, perhaps fifteen minutes ago." He points back toward where he entered the yard.

The woman's throat has been cut, left and back, not cleanly, but with frayed skin bristling all around the wound. Small intestines and flap of the abdomen on the right side, above her shoulder; these are attached by a cord to the remaining intestines, which snake somewhere into the remainder of her abdominal cavity. Two flaps of skin, from the lower part of the abdomen, lying in a great puddle of blood above the left shoulder.

"Her throat was cut while she was already lying down. If she were standing, it would have gone down the front of her dress, but it's here, on the left, above her shoulder, where he started." She drums her fingers against her chin. He can squat here, all preternatural lurk and loom; she needs to pace, back and forth beside the woman, turning one way and then the other, triangulating the yard in her head, and from every possible entryway sketching out this woman's final journey. "She came from the direction of Commercial Street; the man was behind her. This is a high traffic area- lodging houses to either side, Spitalfields Market just down the road. There'll be lodgers, workers, probably other prostitutes coming in and out- but either he felt safe, or he didn't know he might be inadvertently stumbled across by any number of foot traffic. But of course, he's slipped through my hands, he's slipped through yours- he didn't just happen across this spot, he knew it would be a peaceful place to carry out his work. What time is it?" she asks, not looking at him but pointing one hand severely, and she hears him take a watch from his pocket, snap it open, click it shut once more. "4:20."

"She must have been killed recently, but Kol will confirm that. You couldn't have brought her here at midnight- there would have still been people moving in and out, the pubs are just closing- no that would have been a terrible time. But 4:00: nobody's up for work yet, he's right in that window between all the drunks finally bedding down, and the people who are just getting up for the morning shifts." She kneels down next to the woman, and touches her left hand very lightly, barely disturbing it from the breast where it's been tossed. And then back up, with her glass in hand, over to the back wall of the house, near the woman's head, where some eighteen inches from the ground are six spots of blood, from the width of a six-penny piece to that of a pin head. Fourteen inches from the ground, there are spots of clotted blood on the wooden palings, immediately above the puddle over her left shoulder.

At her feet, nearly invisible in the darkness, is a piece of muslin, in which have been wrapped a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb inside a paper case.

"Well, that hardly looks accidental, now does it?" Klaus says, delicately unfolding the piece of muslin in his long fingers to reveal the combs laid neatly side by side. "Hardly something that tumbled out of her pocket by violence."

"Yes," she says, and now kneels down beside him. "He placed them there like that."

From the fog the boys emerge piece by piece: first the clattering heels, which the cobblestones announce with hollow bay, and then the jumbled accents, the two Englishman clamoring over the top of one another and that underlayer of soft Kerry burr.

When they walk into the yard, Kol is beside Tim, close enough that his elbow, winged out from where he's stuck his hand in his pocket, touches Tim's.

He moves away the moment he spots Klaus next to her.

"Kol," she says, and it's the only thing that needs to pass between them; he sweeps off his coat, hands it over to Enzo, and rolls up his sleeves.

"I see your university education hasn't entirely gone to waste, brother. Elijah may comfort himself with that, at least."

"He ought not to make himself too comfortable; I'm still a drunken philistine," Kol assures his brother, kneeling over the woman, first at her head, which he lifts very carefully with two fingers, turning the chin so he can view her neck wound from every angle.

Tim, catching sight of the bottom half of her as he and Enzo pick their way through the dark yard, the former managing his skirts a little awkwardly, turns to the side, and throws up explosively.

"Good job I got my shoes clear of that; Elijah would take back every nice observation he'll make once you relay to him Kol Mikaelson: Medical Examiner Extraordinaire." He fishes his pocket square one-handed out of his vest, and tosses it to Tim.

And then there follows a precise catalog of everything he finds, which she listens to with closed eyes, and the tips of her fingers against her chin. "There are only a few bloodstains, just on her jacket, round the neck, inside and out, and a few on her left arm. A bit on the back of her skirt, on the outside; she must have lain in it. Bodices stained round the neck, hardly anything on the petticoats. Nothing on the stockings. Swelling of her face and the tongue suggest she was probably smothered a bit before he slit her throat. Bruise on the right temple and two bruises the size of a man's thumb on the fore part of the top of her chest. I don't think they're recent, though. However, she's got some scratches on her face and round the sides of her jaw that are fresh. Three scratches just below the lobe of the ear, running in opposite directions to the incisions. Two fresh bruises on the right side of the head and neck, one on the cheek, and the other corresponding with the scratches on her left side. He must have grabbed her by the chin prior to cutting her neck. Ring missing from her ring finger, roughly taken. She's been cut so it looks as if he tried to take off her head, and wasn't able."

"And the abdominal mutilations?" she asks, opening her eyes as he works his way down the body, coming now to huddle on his heels in front of the woman's spread knees, as though assisting a birth.

"Inflicted after death. Someone knew a little something at least about what he was doing. Abdomen's completely open; intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments and lifted out of the body, then placed by the shoulder of the corpse. The uterus and its appendages, along with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, have been removed."

"Removed?" she repeats.

Tim begins to make alarming noises once again.

Enzo pats him on the back.

"Yes, and the incisions were neatly cut; whoever's done it avoided the rectum, and divided the vagina low enough to avoid injuring the cervix uteri. He has at least enough anatomical knowledge to have not made a complete mess of it. Part of the stomach wall's missing as well, and the navel. He did everything with the same knife, I'd say. Something very sharp, thin, narrow, somewhere round six to eight inches in length. Not a bayonet or anything a cobbler would use. Possibly a slaughter man's knife might have done it."

"Thanks," she says, rising. "Easier than sneaking into the mortuary and stealing the medical examiner's report like last time, anyway. Maybe if Lestrade weren't so freaking stingy with his information-"

"There, there, gorgeous," Enzo tells her. "Anyway, between me and Kol, you've a whole army of sticky fingers at your disposal. Our theft is at your service." He winks.

Klaus tries to stare him to death.

"Ok, everyone; spread out. I want you to go over every inch of this yard. If you find anything, don't touch it- tell me immediately. Tim, take the left side. Kol, the right. Enzo, you're going to canvass all the ground in between. Klaus." She snaps her fingers. "Right here, because I don't trust you, so you can look exactly where I look, following me along like a murdery shadow."

In addition to the muslin cloth and the combs, there is a piece of envelope near the woman's head, which holds two pills. On the back: a seal and 'Sussex Regiment' in blue embossing. On the other side: a handwritten 'M', and lower, 'Sp'. There's no postage stamp, only a red postmark which reads: 'London, Aug. 23, 1888.' She slips it into her bodice.

"Isn't that stealing evidence, love?" he asks, and tsks, but with this smile on his face, like some kind of camaraderie has suddenly passed between them, one criminal to another, he is just so happy, beaming here in the moonlight, like this one little sin has irrevocably bound them.

"Boys?" she calls out, turning away from him.

"Just an empty nail box," Enzo calls back.

And from Tim: "A piece of flat steel."

But Kol, crouching at the far end of the yard, lifts one finger and beckons her forward, toward the water tap which is only dimly outlined in the moon that occasionally crests the foam of this murky night, and breasting one cloud, momentarily dares a long stripe or two over the yard before plunging under once more.

At his feet, soaked through, is a leather apron.

It's been thoroughly scrubbed, she finds as she goes over it with the glass, but in the far left corner, on the underside, where it might have brushed against whoever cleaned and then crumpled it here after rinsing it down, is a strand or two of some unknown fiber.

She unrolls her leather tool kit, and taking up a pair of tweezers, carefully, carefully prizes it up from the leather, and drops it into one of her phials.

"Enzo: it's time to go and find a constable."

Back into her skirt pockets go the kit, the tweezers, the phial.

Tim, she finds on turning around, is kneeling beside the woman, completely white, in one of his hands his rosary, his prayer yet unuttered.

His hands are shaking.

"Couldn't we pull the skirt down, give her some little bit of dignity?" he asks, hopefully, and she feels this little pang, and she kneels down across from him, because some things you have to deliver on an equal level, you can't just loom over them, raining proclamations from above, you have to touch a wrist, a cheek, something they can feel in some small and lingering way.

"We have to leave her like we found her so the police can examine her," she says, gently.

Klaus, contrary to her orders, has wandered away toward the edge of the yard, and stands listening into the night along the boulevards, his head cocked.

She whispers over to Kol, "Take him out of the yard for some air," and, handing Tim off, goes to wait beside Klaus.

* * *

Quite a fuss is raised over the latest murder; Caroline spends some time bustling back and forth between Scotland Yard, leaving him and the flat to his own devices (always interesting; never wise). For a good three days, he shakes the frost out of Mrs. Hudson's bones with a series of reports that send her thundering up the stairs to rattle at their door: "You knock off with that revolver, Kol Forbes!" she shouts, and being appeased by his meek and regretful silence, is allowed to reach the third stair before he begins plugging away once more.

On the fourth he returns from an excruciating afternoon tea (Elijah forced him to attend, which he was made to regret: it ought to have ousted the latest victim from tomorrow's premiere pages; you may read about it then) to find her bent over the work table, frowning into her microscope.

"Hello, darling," he says, and unwinding his scarf, leans over to kiss her cheek. He rests his chin on her head. "And what are we doing?"

"Isolating coal-tar derivatives. I need to just sort of relax and turn everything over in my mind."

"Ah, yes, just lazing about, isolating coal-tar derivatives. As one does."

"Well, the Germans are pulling ahead in the synthetic dyes race, and they get really braggy when they outpace us on industrial advances. Do you want that?" She makes some mysterious adjustments.

"It's my greatest fear," he assures her, and kisses the side of her head once more before retiring to his chair, with his feet up on the dining room table, which she notices with her back turned, and both eyes intent upon her experiments. Flapping one hand at him, and making some noises in the back of her throat which he has learned to translate from gibberish to reprimands, she turns at last in her chair.

He takes off his boots, and puts his stockinged feet once more on the table, with his best Nik smile.

She sighs.

But then a thoughtful wave comes over her face, you see it change in a moment, and, getting at her bottom lip with her little teeth, she says to him, "I've analyzed the fibers on the apron we found beside Annie Chapman. They're consistent with the cloth used in police uniforms."

He removes his feet from the table, and leans forward. "So a constable's gone off his head, and, finding it too difficult to arrest them, has instead resorted to killing them?"

A little wrinkle appears between her brows, which in Caroline precedes some revelation or another, behind which the gears are ever whirring, and from one theory to another carrying her in the blink of a mortal man's eye. "I don't think so. I think…it might have been planted."

"Then why go to the trouble of washing the apron? Or perhaps it's unrelated to the murders?"

"No; it's related. It's too big of a coincidence that at the scene of a murder, a series in a string of which are being pinned on some mysterious 'Leather Apron' wandering around Whitechapel harassing prostitutes, a leather apron, completely unconnected to the case, suddenly appears. It was placed there purposefully. And if he's clever enough to evade me, to evade your brother- who, by the way, is freaking incensed that some wannabe is swaggering around the East End killing people without his permission- he's clever enough to have removed all traces of himself. So why wash it down and leave just that little bit of evidence where it can be found by investigators? He left it to be found. It doesn't point to a constable. But it does perhaps point to someone with casual access to one- otherwise how else do you get the fibers?" She spins back round in her chair. "So you see why the coal-tar derivatives."

He holds his hands out to either side. "I always turn to them in my time of need."

Caroline having flung herself headlong once more into her dyes, he takes his feet from the table, and turning to retreat to his bedroom, where he's a book and needle awaiting him, crosses the room, shedding his coat on the way, and tossing it carelessly over the couch; something for her to moan about later, when she's the concentration to spare for his domestic habits.

"Oh," she says, in a terribly casual voice, quite suspicious, the hair on him bristles instantly, "something sort of funny I just so happened to notice: I thought you hated Dickens?"

"Yes, Great Expectations could drive a less handsome man to shoot himself in the face. I wouldn't, of course. My bone structure, you know."

She turns to him with such an angelic glow he checks the pistol in his pocket; he'll only nick her, of course, but in his experience, an expression such as that generally heralds the necessity for a head start. "Then why did I find 'Bleak House' hidden under your mattress?"

"Why were you in my bedroom?"

" _You_ do not get to ask me that, Mr. Oncesodomizedacabdriveronmybed." She taps her steepled fingers against her lips.

"I've elected to give him another go."

"Do you know who else likes Dickens?" she asks, divesting her halo for something more smug, a terrible expression, reminds him of his brother. "Tim."

"What an astounding coincidence," he replies, and offering no further repartee, retreats to his room.

* * *

Next day Caroline dons a cap and coat and in her faded sleuthing clothes dashes out to sew up a trifling little case, nothing that should occupy more than an hour, she assures her client: just a little something to keep her brain nimble.

His assistance not being required, he resigns himself to batting those terrible vases off the dining room table: they make a satisfying crash against the far wall. Caroline will lament the mess, but justice having been served in removing their existence from this mortal plane, she ought not to be too terribly inclined to snap at him.

September tests all their windows, and, finding every crack, blows a solemn layer over the flat, so that even the sofa is no longer a refuge, and holding the promise of winter in its cushions, flinches the skin at a touch. He stokes the fire, and rings for a cuppa; Mrs. Hudson has heard the vases, and eyes him evilly when she brings it up, steaming on its tray.

"Thank you, darling," he says, and smoothes her with a smile.

At three o'clock, the bell is rung, and a pair of boots with uneven heels (he does pick up a thing or two from her) makes its way to the second landing, and then down the hall to his own door, where their owner taps somewhat tentatively, being of obvious British persuasion, and comprehending the sanctity of Afternoon Tea.

A client, most likely, too desperate to observe proprieties and come later.

He opens the door to find Tim standing on the other side.

"Hello," he says, which appears to be the extent of his conversational prowess for today, as he sinks both hands into his pockets immediately afterward, and shuts his mouth with apparent permanence.

"Caroline's out, but you can wait in the sitting room, if you like," he offers, not with too much hope in his voice, he's proud to say. You have to leave them panting a bit. He lusts after me, he lusts after me not.

"Actually. I've come to see you," Tim tells him, and wrestling for a moment with the pocket where he's left his right hand, he draws out a pocket square, neatly-folded, absolutely spotless; certainly it isn't his own, in consideration of these observations. "I've had it cleaned. There's nothing left on it." He flushes lightly. "Sure I'm sorry about that." He extends the piece of cloth, his other hand still firmly wedged in his pocket.

"Keep it," he says. "I've a thousand of them." And anyway, darling, you'll want something on which to take our your unsated frustrations, when his presence is unbearably near, and decorum pressing ever at your heels, scrutinizing from ten thousand street corners.

"Right. Thanks a million, then."

And stuffing it back in his pocket, Tim turns to leave. Not terribly deft with either end of the conversation, he sees.

"I've only just finished 'Bleak House'," he blurts out. "It was passable."

"Passable?" Tim asks, turning back to him. "Did you not read the description of the sunlight on the statues, and the shadows waking the portraits, just as if they were living?"

He leans on the door frame, smiling up into the long-lashed eyes. "You could come in and discuss it a bit. Show me the error of my ways," he says, and leaning back into the room, opens up proper space for Tim to pass inside.

For a moment he stands considering this, and then, removing his coat, he crosses the threshold, rolling up his sleeves as he goes.

* * *

In the course of a week, Klaus charms his way past Mrs. Hudson on three separate occasions.

The first time she finds him playing chess with Kol, and arguing over who is cheating more.

The second she interrupts him mid-rifle, with her copy of _Psychopathia Sexualis_ in his sticky little hand. "I didn't know you speak German, love."

"Yes. Do you know what else I speak? Propriety. Would you like me to teach you a few rules? One: Don't break into people's apartments. Two: do. Not. Touch. Their. Things." She snatches the book out of his hand.

He dimples. "You can't speak it very fluently, in men's trousers and with your hair down."

"Out."

"Are you quite certain? I might have any number of your belongings on me." He wiggles his fingers. "I've a thief's fingers, you know. Very deft."

At the risk of causing him great pleasure, she sighs, she pinches the bridge of her nose, she pats him down thoroughly while he holds his arms out to either side and just beams from every pore of him.

"Is that a flask in my pocket, or am I just happy to see you?" he asks, innocently, lifting both his eyebrows.

She removes a chemical phial from his pocket.

The third time, he is sitting at her work table, fussing with all her chemicals, and when she enters the room, without turning, he says, "Bisulphate of baryta; quite tricky to isolate; impressive, sweetheart," and with his long fingers picks up several pipettes and begins to dispatch their contents into various flasks.

* * *

She enjoys two blissfully quiet days.

On the next, Wiggins disappears.

* * *

She's pacing.

She needs…something. Some crack through which to slip, some flaw in this man's method, some mistake by which every human trips themselves up, and, stumbling, now walk imprecisely, and behind them lug all that long convict's line of _presence_ they cannot help dragging after them.

Kol is lying on the sofa, reading something that is very decisively not written by Dickens.

The clock on the mantle tells her it is just after five o'clock. The streets are at full roar, and past her window charge to distant engagements, each of them indistinct though London, mud-colored, and with a malicious twinkle in its clouds, tries to rubber stamp every sooty brow.

She turns to her encyclopedias.

Kol, eyeing this sudden veering from window to bookcase, wisely returns to his book.

Exactly three minutes into her feverish alphabetizing, the bell is rung downstairs.

No, not 'rung', but jerked with such violence the caller's desperation is absorbed into the bell, and it cries out with such human longing.

Kol sits up.

She spins around.

The gait is a beat shorter on the left, and you can hear, if you turn your ears sharply enough, how the coat is more loudly agitated on the side closest to the doors.

He always swings his arm harder on the right side.

"It's Enzo," she says, and yanks open the door. "What's happened?"

He takes the steps two at a time, half-carrying the boy at his side, whose shorter legs cannot manage this stride, and, setting him down on the threshold, looks up at her through his messy bangs, panting from his long run.

"It's Wiggins!" the boy wails before Enzo can get it out. "'E's gone!"

"Ok, Charlie. Go and have a seat in my chair, all right?" she says, and smiles brightly at him, gently steering him into the apartment, and when his back is turned, aiming her grimmest look towards Enzo, who in the meantime has pulled himself together. "What is he talking about?"

"Someone took him, they think. He and Charlie were going about Whitechapel, on a task you'd given them, Charlie says, and round about two or so, he vanishes suddenly. Charlie goes bowling up and down the East End, looking round every nook- and you know they've every one of them scouted- and he comes away completely empty-handed. He's come charging to me only twenty minutes ago, and I've brought him here. He's all in a roar; thinks some pervert may have nipped Wiggins."

Kol is trying to give Charlie absinthe, she finds when she enters the apartment with Enzo on her heels, and she darts forward to snatch the bottle out of his hand. "You can't give him this! He's a child."

"A street child, Caroline. He could probably drink me under the table. And anyway, it'll take the edge off. He clearly needs to have a few sanded off him."

"Then you give him warm _tea_! Seriously-"

"Telegram!" the page Billy interrupts as she inflates herself with just the hugest dressing-down, and putting out one hand to him, she takes it without looking, still turning the leaves of her lecture around in her mind, and examining them from every angle, so she can decide where best to enter into Caroline's Valid Life Lessons.

"Caroline," Enzo says, taking it from her hand.

"Charlie, put your hands over your ears. Kol, I _swear_ -"

" _Caroline_ ," Enzo says once more, with uncharacteristic sharpness, and she half-turns to take the telegram in numb fingers as he shoves it at her.

"'Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre to-night at seven o'clock. If you are distrustful bring two friends. The boy is unharmed, but that may well be subject to change. Do not bring police. If you do, all will be in vain. Your unknown friend.'"

She turns the telegram about in her fingers, once, twice, and then, setting it down carefully on the table while the boys diligently follow every teeniest twitch of her fingers, she says, "Kol, which of your mansions is Klaus' favorite?"

* * *

He doesn't open the door himself.

He's waiting at the head of the dining room table, with his fingers steepled.

Ten thousand (she has exaggerated minutely) dishes waft their exotic steams ceiling-ward. The floor echoes back each firm step, which she has made certain, she has assured will touch its toes to every marble tile like a queen descending her dais, but she thinks, looking at his face, looking at his smile: this is the wrong approach.

It's always the wrong approach with him.

He will always smile in exactly this enamored way like the gas lamps, the chandeliers, these are all superfluous inventions of men who are not already aware, Caroline Forbes invented the sun, and carries it around in her pocket.

"Where is he?" she asks.

"You were supposed to go to the Lyceum Theatre."

"I am not playing your _games_ , Klaus. Where is Wiggins?"

He snaps his fingers. It is all he ever has to do, and before you can blink, his every hope and wish just... _materializes_.

Two men escort Wiggins into the dining hall.

And she was going to hurry over to him, she was going to take him in her arms and suffer these long-distant pangs of motherhood women like her are not supposed to feel, but he comes out skipping, with a glow in his cheeks, and, going over to Klaus, shakes his hand heartily.

She freezes.

"'Ello, Ms. Forbes. You wasn't worried? Mr. Mikaelson, 'e's a smashin' chap. Smashin'. 'E can kidnap me anytime 'e likes, I say."

"Johnathon; if you would have a cab sent round for the boy," Klaus says to one of the lackeys, not looking away from her.

Wiggins is taken off in a shower of compliments under which Klaus smirks so hard she might be concerned about permanent damage to his face, if she were inclined to be concerned about anything regarding his face, which she most certainly is definitely not. "Ok," she says coldly. "Well, if there's already a cab."

He basically vaults out of his chair, and mid-leap his dignity makes this sudden assertion of will to remind him, right, you have to do everything at approximately half the pace of a normal man if the peons are to know just how casually you take life because it bends its every head to your capricious will, and in each shift of weather, industry, revolution, wonders to itself, how might I better Serve?

He straightens his dinner jacket and with his hands behind his back now rounds the table like he's on some leisurely stroll.

"Dinner's already set," he points out.

"I am not having dinner with you. You just kidnapped a child!"

"Who has not a mark upon him, and got five shillings out of it, to boot." He makes this really annoying contemplative face. "That's…five times what you pay him, isn't it?"

"Are you trying to steal my employees?"

"Of course not. That would be unethical." He dimples.

"Yeah. And you are the very pinnacle of ethical aspiration."

"I do enjoy these little _salles_ , Caroline."

He's stopped using 'Ms. Forbes'. It bothers her. He wants there to be no distance between them; he wants not the formal wall of societal respectability, but this long intimacy of man and wife, who in the depths of their abodes are allowed all sorts of scandalous ankle caressing.

"Anyway. Not nice seeing you," she says, and smiles her best Savage Southerner farewell.

She must cut at least three arteries.

"If you're not hungry, perhaps you'd enjoy a round or two about my gallery?" he offers, with this infuriating touch of innocence, because he has precisely calculated it to pause her mid-step, to stay the rustling skirts, to bring boiling to her foremost recollections every slippery little niche of him that she cannot take hold of.

He has shown her this one piece, he has let her have this one true and genuine thing.

You can read every lost philosophical tome, plucked from the ashes of Alexandria. But humans don't keep their souls there. All the messiest parts of them, every failure, every dream, every striving, these they take, and they put into their art.

She hesitates.

She can know, without turning, how he licks his lips, and tilts his head down so he can look up through his lashes, so he can see all the world, and the world must look back at him from this awkward angle, and try to pull from this contrived expression anything real, anything like what other men tamp down under their surface, but never really hide.

She turns slowly back to him.

She doesn't need to say 'yes': he is already smiling.

* * *

He's nervous.

And that's such a small, human thing, it reaches down past her reason, past her experience, it plucks some distant string that sings out in these strange yearnings towards fellow creatures who live and die and wander.

She turns over the pages on his work table and stands before each painting for seconds, minutes, whole eternities.

She knows in every monster there is some mundane hobbyist, mechanically filling his hours.

But his paintings leap from their frames; his drawings sit up and keen. Along these walls whole populations live, all these little bits of him he's found somewhere, somehow and mercilessly cut out with his charcoal.

"That is of my brother Henrik," he says for the first time in minutes as she examines a painting of a boy, some ten years of age. "He died when he was very young. Shortly after he sat for this, actually."

"Kol's mentioned him. Once," she replies, softly, she doesn't know why, but there's this…strain between them, not a jagged thing, this pressure, she doesn't know how to describe it, a quiet thing, no thunderstorm prescience but a harbinger of something different, some prehistoric comprehension between humans. "Consumption. My father died of it."

"Recently?"

"Three years ago. But you don't know that, when they're not there."

"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. She doesn't know how to take that. She thinks: so there was this guy with a brother, and he loved him. And then how do you abandon that, how are you touched by humanity, there's not some cold hole in you which it forgot to fill, it exists, it has its own space, and under its arm gathers every loved face, cherishing them all, and then suddenly, you just…you let go?

She reaches out for a sketchpad sitting on the worktable, closed, and touches the cover with the tips of her fingers.

Klaus rips it out from under her.

"What the _hell_ , Klaus? What's in that one? Do you come home and sketch dead prostitutes so you can relive your most infamous crimes? 'I call this one 'Pulling the Wool Over Caroline'," she says, not entirely seriously.

He's completely silent.

" _Do_ you?" she demands, and lunges for it.

There is a brief struggle over the sketchpad. Beezlebub the Fair, Ruler of Man, God, and Gravity (seriously, how he coerces his curls into cooperating every second of the day, come rain, wind, or soot, she would absolutely love to know), fumbles it like a child still developing their motor skills.

She takes off across the gallery, flipping it open as she goes.

They're not prostitutes.

They're her.

He has recreated her down to every minuscule detail, in every pose, in every emotion, through the whole broad range of her expressions, with such accuracy she finds in her hands instead of vellum a mirror.

In some twisted part of her, she thinks: he noticed there's the tiniest hint of a dimple in her left cheek when she's truly happy?

Aloud, she says, "This is creepy."

"Kol did them."

She gives him a Look.

"Kol hates drawing. It requires sitting still for long periods of time. The only way I can distract him from dismantling our apartment is by putting a book in his hand, and then you better hope it's something saucy, with scandal in it. The only reason the apartment is even still standing is because I keep him on a steady diet of sensation literature. So, no, he did not do these. Please try and respect the fact that I'm a genius, sans external genitalia and everything."

He looks oddly chastised; it disturbs her. She doesn't like being put on this sort of footing with him; she wants to always remember: he is not a man, not quite.

Carefully, so their fingers do not touch, she returns the sketchpad to him.

He stands looking down, like a boy, worrying the edges of it with his big hands.

But then he sneaks this look back up at her, he's checking to see how this wily little touch has charmed her, see how unthreatening, endearing, apple-cheeked I can be, he asks her with this look, and ruins it with his smile.

And there's this…relief. She feels something release in her. She feels the world, suddenly capsizing under her, abruptly right and steam along on its former course. He is always devious, shrewd, he always presents exactly what he wants seen; there are no inadvertent discoveries. What you grab hold of you have been handed.

But he keeps the sketchpad under his arm as they stroll along another wall, so she can't get at it anymore.

"Have you thought anymore on my proposal?" he asks.

"What proposal?" she asks absently, stopping in front of a portrait of a beautiful blonde woman in a dress of burgundy silk.

"The flat in Whitechapel."

"I'm pretty sure I very decisively turned you down by pointing out that every probability points to you murdering me in my sleep."

"I thought I'd assuaged that fear rather tidily, love. And, exactly how close are you to closing in on the murderer?"

"You know the answer to that; you really don't need to rub it in my face," she replies distractedly. "Who is this woman?"

"My sister Rebekah. I'm sure Kol's mentioned her a time or two."

"Strange. I've never met her, but there's something…familiar?"

"Perhaps you're merely struck by the uniformity by which genetics have blessed the Mikaelson siblings?" he asks, smiling.

"Or maybe she's a stalker like her big brother and what I'm remembering is all that tingly back of the neck _wrongness_ people tend to experience in the presence of your family?"

"You feel tingly whenever I'm about?"

She gives him another Look.

She moves along to the next painting, lingering on the technicality, and glossing over its soul. He shadows her down the room, watching her face, not even glancing to see what she is reacting to, but rather letting the reactions themselves absorb him.

Finally, ten minutes into a silence he is apparently determined not to break first, she says, "Fine. I accept."

And then she turns, so she can look him eye to eye when she destroys him: "But Enzo comes with me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the long wait; I haven't had as much time to write over the last few weeks, and there's a lot of research involved in this. Anyway, thank you for reading. I know you're all wondering when the hell KC is going to do it: all in good time. The next update will show them cohabitating in Whitechapel (with their chaperone Enzo), so they'll get to it eventually, I promise. Up next: more murder, Kol and Tim take over the flat while Caroline is gone and have a go at this detecting thing; it can't be all that hard. Besties Klaus and Enzo deepen their bond. Caroline seriously contemplates holding Klaus under the Thames until his feet stop kicking.
> 
> I estimate this will be around fourish parts of equal size, so we've still got a couple of updates to go.


	3. Part Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hello and welcome to the hotly-anticipated next part in a fic we kind of (me included) all forgot about. I have risen from the ashes of my personal life and black writerly depression to bring you this collection of overwritten facts about Victorian London (bonus: Klaus' lousy poetry).
> 
> Some historical notes: according to a shoe size chart from the Victorian era that I looked up, Tim's feet are in fact quite large; 13 was the second largest size in men's that one shop was offering, so probably that does bode well for Kol. The conversion for his weight is 193 1/2 lbs. (Caroline is nothing if not precise). The potato man was a real street show in Victorian London (though the account I read took place a little earlier than this story is set), because when you don't have TV, you have to entertain yourself somehow.
> 
> The smoke-rocket Kol has is what Sherlock Holmes used in A Scandal in Bohemia to determine where Irene Adler was hiding her blackmail photos. Kol, of course, uses it for evil instead of good. 'Le Fanu' is a reference to J. Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish author who wrote many gothic tales and ghost stories (plus a vampire novel that predates Dracula and inspired some of its mythos; also: lesbians). Wilkie Collins was the author of numerous novels from the sensation lit genre (and a friend of Dickens').
> 
> J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement is an 1884 short story by Conan Doyle that was first published anonymously in Cornhill Magazine. Some took it as a true statement from a real survivor and reprinted it as a factual story, despite the fact that some of the key details did not add up with what was then known about the disappearance of the Mary Celeste.
> 
> Also, the headings on the telegrams are postal branches. I imagine the poor, overworked postal employee probably wants to kill them all.
> 
> Anyway; that's all for now. I hope you enjoy all the murder and these characters acting exactly like they always have in any of my stories, even though they're now human and should probably calm the fuck down a bit.
> 
> P.S. I really wish this miserable site would just let me put some extra space between things instead of having to use a line break for EVERYTHING.

**Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

**A Quick Reminder of Caroline's House Rules:**

**1\. No smoking**

**2\. No cocaine**

**3\. The couch is EXACTLY perpendicular to the analysis table (I'll** **_know_ ** **)**

**4\. No sex**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

**5\. Put my manifesto on poisons back EXACTLY where it was shelved**

**6\. No fires in non-designated fire areas**

**7\. Actually no fires in the fireplace either; we all remember the incident of spring '87**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

**8\. Do not woo, harass, titillate, or otherwise shock the clients**

**9\. Do not SLEEP with the clients**

**10\. No sex no sex no sex no SEX**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

**And since I know you're going to ignore every single one of these, at least keep me apprised of the damage so I can relax a little. My imagination can conjure up things even you're not capable of.**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

**Please do not take that as a challenge.**

**Love you.**

**P.S. Your brother is completely unbearable**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**One minor explosion. Mrs. Hudson has been placated. Nik's absolute rubbish adolescent poetry to follow.**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**In rosy dawn**

**I do fawn**

**Over your scintillating eyeball orbs like a light left on**

**I assume there was some concern over whether or not the reader would comprehend the true roundness of the eyeballs. Also, the grammar compels one to ask precisely what is 'like a light left on'; the eyeball orbs, or Nik's fawning?**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

**You are my favorite human (and I'm even including Enzo in that).**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**A 16-year-old attempt at 'erotic' poetry:**

**Through your petals**

**I did glimpse the kettles**

**Of passion boiling boiling**

**With wicked alchemy like foreign metals**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**There once was a lady**

**She was called Katie**

**On our meeting did lie the touch of Fate(ie)**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

**I believe you recall my solution to the problem of Bekah's 2** **nd** **husband; let's not render it necessary that I repeat such methodology, brother.**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

**I should think you don't have to worry about that last telegram, mate. Only Caroline is allowed to threaten her boys, as you know. Best dressing-down I ever did see. Punching him in the face wasn't nearly as satisfactory.**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Lorenzo St. John**

**Ask Nik to draw a picture of it next time.**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

**Will do, mate. How's the flat?**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Lorenzo St. John**

**Intact, actually. We're all very surprised/overwhelmed/a bit teary-eyed with pride. I have moved the sofa and both chairs, and swapped the analysis table with the dining table. Burn this telegram after you receive it. It's better if it's a surprise.**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

**! KOL. ANTHONY. MIKAELSON. I'M SO UPSET I'VE ACTUALLY MADE UP A MIDDLE NAME FOR YOU. DO. NOT. TOUCH. THE. ANALYSIS. TABLE.**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**Oh, but not Anthony; that's terrible. How about something like 'Zeuscock'?**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**Nothing, darling?**

* * *

**Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

**Please hear my extremely drawn-out sigh in your head, and just give me a status report.**

* * *

**Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

**Well, as you know, I've rearranged the entire flat. One (relatively less minor) explosion. Three new bullet holes. Some opium, and I'm diligently working on violating the No sex no sex no sex no SEX rule, rest assured, darling.**

* * *

From the bookcase he extracts the ledger which Caroline keeps on her employees, meticulously alphabetized, and dusted with constant unshelvings, so the cover is freshly smug beside its more neglected brethren.

Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, 6' 4", 87.7701 kg. Born April 14, 1863. Shoe size: 13 (that bodes well for him, don't you think?). In her regimentally neat script, she has also noted his chest, waist, hip and inseam measurements, and below this recorded several of his more mundane habits, among them a propensity for playing with his pocket watch, a preference for peppermint candy, and a partiality to pistols of German manufacture (he does hope you enjoy this searing succession of alliteration, darlings; a more overwritten passage Nik himself could not manage in those florid underage floggings of grammar, common decency, and good taste*).

*Forgive him his sins, and may your soul and eyes convalesce from what purple gymnastics Nik has prepared in honour of hurtling this particular gauntlet.

Tim has three scars from childhood (a rowdy cousin, dog, and switch-wielding mother, respectively), and in his first youth worked in some proximity to sheep; in his second, he plies the St. Katharine Docks with a gang comprised mostly of Dublin émigrés, the head of which is called John McDonald, and can generally be located on the west dock.

He returns the ledger to its proper place, lining it up precisely with its neighbor volumes (he's not entirely reckless), and proceeds in a cab to the entrance of the gates, and from there on foot, with his hands in his pockets, and in one of his scrubbier suits, so the pickpockets do not all rush him at once, making here a grab there a grab for the dandy and his fat wallet. He's on a schedule; and anyway, he's left his bat at home, which if not the sole method of dispatching ruffians, is certainly the most entertaining. Anyone can shoot a man.

The clouds are in uncommonly good spirits this evening. Sunset has just dyed the undersides of them, and flung down its handful of paint, which the men carry about in their beards as they scurry from ship to warehouse conveying their sugar sacks and rolls of carpeting. All along the Thames the steamships with grave impatience tower over these diligent ant's nests, gliding with silent judgement up to their own locks, and throwing open the hatches for the waiting laborers.

He's made to stroll along the locks for some time before spotting a head taller than those surrounding it, and, double-taking, he confirms its identity by way of the blue eyes, momentarily visible beneath the brim of that hat, and the tuft of hair at the nape of the neck as Tim, alighting on the dock, turns back to shout good-bye to one of the men on deck.

There's a group of some dozen men clustered near one of the hatches, and a little ginger-bearded man in their midst, dispensing shillings from one hand, and with the other marking down notations in a fat notebook; Tim joins the queue politely, and in the interim between queue and payment making three checks of his pocket watch, which a more gracious man might take as a sign of previous engagement, and leave him to his appointment.

He waits at the end of the dock, stirring his fingers about his pockets (mildly ruinous to his casual poise) and with one ear listening to that cacophony unique to all harbours, where squalling Nature confronts the working man, and tussles grievously with him, and who shall rise the victor depends entirely upon her current pique, and how deeply either sea or wind has taken it to heart.

Today the labourers and ship captains out-shout her, those marble slabs which smell of far winters wrestle the Thames for dominance, and in a stalemate combine that sickly amalgamation of foreign quarries and sewage. The warehouses emit and admit opposing streams of labourers hauling crates or strolling empty-armed back to their cargo; if the wares do not overpower the Thames, certainly the men's sweat will gladly try its hand.

His other ear, aimed back along the dock, picks up the sound of footsteps. Caroline, without looking, and carrying on a conversation about the asymmetry of carbon-bonds, would absently pin down the exact height, weight, probable occupation, and presence/absence of facial hair of this unseen stroller whilst curling her hair and jotting down cigar ash varieties. He is, of course, merely an extraordinarily handsome mortal, and must hazard a guess.

He slicks back his hair and looks away from the line of men continuously streaming from the nearest warehouse.

Tim has stopped a few feet down the dock, for a moment taken aback, and then his face blossoms in one of those smiles which the wearer barely notices, and still less can help. "What are you doing here?"

"Just out for a stroll. Fancy meeting you here," he says with the same smile; it's quite annoying.

"Oh really?"

"Actually, I've orders from Caroline."

"And what has she for us today?" Tim asks, closing the distance between them leisurely, and with his hands in his pockets. His shirt is stained with some twelve hours of unloading; he's rolled the sleeves back to his elbows, so all the forearm muscles are on fortuitous display. One might almost be distracted from the three buttons he's undone, to let the Thames' pungent winds cool his chest.

"Actually, I've made that up as well," he says as they fall into step, heading toward the south gate. "But you're a bit charmed, aren't you, that I didn't want to admit I'd come all the way here to see you?"

"More so before you started blowing your own trumpet over it." Tim smiles at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Fancy a drink?"

"Oh." Tim pauses, jingling the watch in his pocket, and for a moment undergoing some struggle of bashfulness which is to him as profound a mystery as Caroline's puzzlement over how the length of a man's sleeve could not possibly indicate anything to him other than some piddling difference in centimeters. "I've actually saved a bit of money…I thought I'd pop down to the Irish Exhibition in Olympia tonight." He attempts to dig a hole in the dock with the toe of his boot. "Would you…like to come?"

"I always like to come," he says, and slings one arm around Tim's shoulders.

* * *

_But these are trifling details. Of what interest is a dock labourer and an aristocrat who has not yet purged his propensity for slumming? In every monarchy can be found dabbles with commoners; one soon blots its lustre from the eye. Novelty is of necessity a mortal glow, and dies having uttered its first wondrous exclamations._

_Shall we follow this prince and his pauper through dust and rabble, marinate ourselves in the scent of cheap beer and the unwashed masses, wend past these thatched roofs who secrete in their straws the faraway mosses of Ireland, stop when our secondary characters must goggle over this supreme miracle of sixty Kerry cows switching their tails beside these fairy dust manipulations of milk into butter- are we to laugh when, having consumed enough beer to transform him from mouse to man, the dock labourer is persuaded not only to watch without protest his better companion take up arms at the replica castle, but in fact to participate himself? When the true stars of our narrative reside on the far side of London, contributing with wit and dignity to stories yet untold?_

_Surely He is a far more fascinating specimen than a paltry scuffle over a mock siege, and some drunken blunder through the village with half a dozen performers on their heels. Kol has been ejected from many a public event; whether he outruns the coordinators of this one is of no consequence._

_If instead you wish to observe all of humanity's attributes in one convenient location, and the one mind which is nearly not inferior to His own, follow my pen, back through those entrance caves of limestone and sandstone, beneath the stalactites which have long since nodded off, trembling at no earthly fury, and leaving in your wake the cries of the Exhibition goers, and that peculiar scent which its organizers have distilled from Eire herself, where green is no mere hue but a manifestation of our every waking sense. There are humans not so animate as an Irish green (most of whom can be found in Parliament)._

_With that perception unique to writers (the talented ones, anyway), I find it necessary to now relate the singular adventure of the Moran Incident. If you have kept a diligent eye to your papers, you will hear the familiarity with which this name lightly plucks at your consciousness, and find in some deep recess a jumble of minor biographical details: Colonel Sebastian Moran, formerly of Her Majesty's Indian Army, a heavy-game shot the likes of which the Empire and indeed Europe has never bested or even replicated. I shall allow further descriptions of his character an significance in this tale to fall from lovelier mouths._

* * *

Enzo is sitting on the bed Klaus absolutely, unequivocally, in the most condescending terms possible, declared as his own, eating a pork chop he conjured from…somewhere (Enzo's talents for food acquisition are beyond even her observational powers).

They're staring at one another.

Klaus' nose and mouth pinch together when he's genuinely put out; everything shrinks to this one little point, leaving the eyes swimming about almost independent of the rest of his face, squintier than usual, but of no real competition for his old woman lips, ten thousand lemons into their temper tantrum.

Enzo drips pork fat on the bed.

She is deciphering the notebooks she has found hidden all around the flat, half a dozen of them spread out over the cot which she has already dragged into one dusty corner and prettied with a new comforter and a pot of geraniums, carefully arranged on the windowsill beside it. She works clockwise, scribbling notes in the margins of each book before moving on to the next, and in this way blazing through each page; he has coordinated them to be read together, so that in the absence of one notebook, the others are indecipherable; mildly clever.

"The problem with your cipher," she says, bouncing the pencil on her lip, "is that you think you're smarter than literally everyone in the world."

"Get. Off. My. Bed," he snarls at Enzo.

She rolls her eyes, and makes three more notations.

Enzo's chewing increases in volume; he makes no other response.

Klaus will make one more demand. In precisely forty-five seconds, Enzo will condescend to acknowledge him. A gun will be pulled.

At thirty seconds she finishes her current note and, standing, crosses the room to touch Klaus' hand at the thirty five second mark, before Enzo can look up, before he can drip another calculated splotch of fat onto the ragged blanket, before the hand which she touches now, and squeezes warningly, can remove its sweatily-clutched pistol, and bring it to bear. "Boys. Why argue, when you can instead spend your time making yourselves useful?" She takes the map tucked into her pocket, and opens it with a crisp snap. "Now: I've already circled the three remaining pawnshops we haven't yet checked. Here are the descriptions of Annie Chapman's rings, and a list of questions to ask. We'll take one each," she says, handing out the scraps of paper with their inked instructions, and each man's name helpfully noted at the top. (Enzo's already has a cheery 'good job!' marked down at the bottom; Klaus' is glaringly blank.) You can't let men think about their commands for too long, so she clicks her tongue at them both, and flapping her hands, shoos them along toward the door.

"Be careful," she tells Enzo, adjusting his collar, and smoothing the hair off his forehead. She'll need to cut it again.

"You too, gorgeous," he says, and, holding one another at arms-length, they exchange cheek kisses.

Klaus she ignores.

* * *

In Virginia, summer gets a prolonged death, and expires in a gentle breath of tenderized fruit trees, ripened by their illness. But a mid-September London doesn't have time for that; it isn't going to gentle you into anything. It sneaks up behind you, and with one yellow breath, blows out the sun, blots the lamps, makes of all these labouring peoples one massless sensation to haunt your peripheral senses. The soot and the fog and the rain all blend together into one amateur watercolor, when the artist has calmly seen to nothing, and let everything rise in monochrome insouciance.

But today the sun has decided nope, no sir; it's broken through the clouds. Onto the faces and the horses and the food stalls it slops its brightest rays, and if the wind cries after to remind the beggars even here, on the heels of nature's best plumage, are winter's raw tabulations, already counting up its victims, at least for a moment, in the sun, the dust, all these wild flurries of scent, sound, _life_ , there is somewhere a hothouse spring, welcoming new roses.

A milk woman hobbles under her yoke, her empty cans jingling along toward the dairy. At every step the beggar children assault the best-dressed pedestrians, proffering the sores they have crafted from a paste of oatmeal, vinegar, and berry juice; they scratch at real lice, and tilt their faces to showcase the soot shadows beneath their eyes. From the food vendors the warm steams of canned potatoes and all those penny pies with their hidden caches- the glistening puddings and wilting watercress and oysters at three for a penny, all these vent their buttery temptations and the sour coal of an overenthusiastic grill, the sweet creams, the saccharine reek of horse manure, wafting its half-digested alfalfas-

Klaus has followed her.

She slips between two food stalls and hops up out of the street, onto the pavement, and suddenly he is right beside her, smiling.

"Your pawn shop is that way," she says rudely, pointing behind her. "I know, because I very carefully arranged it so I could get as far away from you as possible while ensuring you're still actually useful to me. The shops are closing soon. So instead of stalking me, why don't you go complete your assigned task, and then you can report back to me, and maybe I'll…" She twirls one hand in the air, thinking. "I don't know. Exchange five minutes of forced small talk with you."

"You don't have to worry about my 'assignment', love," he says, and snaps his fingers.

A man in tattered but clean shirt and trousers pops up right in front of them; wordlessly, he takes the instructions Klaus holds out, and with this same eerie silence, melts away into the crowd, where he is immediately swallowed by the beggars. "Don't worry, sweetheart; he's competent. Anyone who works for me and proves himself useless doesn't last for very long."

She increases her stride.

He is four inches taller, and easily matches it.

He has this way of walking; it pisses her off. He keeps his hands behind his back, agilely dodging horse manure, miscellaneous trash, those marshy bits of roadway that have clung most stubbornly to the last rainstorm, and never does he break this position, he has no concern of pickpockets, cutthroats, drunken cab drivers; he just strolls along, smiling at her. There's this whole aura about him; you can't break it. The pickpockets who eye him turn aside; the beggars are immediately off in quest of other marks; he doesn't even have to look at them. He doesn't have to lower himself like that. He just walks along, trailing…something in his wake, and you feel it touch the edges of you, you feel, quivering, this unnatural brush, you have not been touched physically, no, no mundane such grazings for Beezlebub Satington III, and yet you _know_ : cast down your eyes, and walk just a little faster.

He probably practices in front of his mirror as diligently as any lady navigating imaginary omnibus ladders.

But, see, what pisses her off most: he looks so happy, just to be walking next to her.

You don't dehumanize the worst of men; history is this lazy cyclical thing: it will run along in the same grooves forever, and stupid man pushing it along with his shoulder, wondering why he feels the same dirt beneath his boots, and the same tree flashes its laden old branches, exchanging its apples for snow, endlessly. When you take men, and you mold them out of some fantastical clay, you say to yourself, but _we_ are not of the same earth, the next atrocity may be by your own unstained hands.

But neither do you look at him, and you see his smile, you see, once in a while, he takes some time from kicking babies and skinning old women (she has this theory: he makes coats out of them) to trail along after a girl, not molesting her, not even talking to her, just existing in her shadow, and hoping she'll look up- you don't _see that_ and think oh _oh_ : he's like any other man after all.

It is humans who commit our atrocities, always.

But you can't let the worst of them slither into your conscience, and pinch it to wakefulness because there are parts of them that are warm, and vulnerable, and once, somewhere, there was a mother.

Probably even she hated his stupid dimples.

"Ok," she says, because this is quite enough, thank you, and she pulls out another map from her pocket, unfolding it to reveal all the murder sites, carefully circled. Next from her trouser pocket she retrieves a little notepad, and a stub of pencil, and she shoves them at him. "You dictate; I'll talk. So. Let's go over the similarities between these murders again. All prostitutes; all murdered in the early hours. They were all mutilated, and each of them had a fondness for drink, which is not exactly uncommon when you have to make your living by letting literally any penis stick itself in you, but let's hold onto that anyway. And you didn't recognize Annie Chapman; so maybe the victims are not your employees, and the first two were just coincidences. Wait; how many prostitutes do you have employed as spies? Enough that it's entirely possibly two could just randomly fall victim to a murderer because you have that many of them in your pocket, or few enough that it's a notable event?"

"Enough," he says, and hands the notepad back to her.

He's encoded all the notes he's just taken; not the cipher from the notebooks he's stored around his flat: it's nothing she's ever seen before.

She stops in the middle of the street, and smoothly he takes her arm.

"Let's not tarry, shall we? There's a gentleman over there who's eyeing the contents of your purse."

She gives this little huff.

He is _so_ pleased with himself; he doesn't let go of her arm.

He does shoot a withering look at a man who, flicking aside his cigarette, double takes at the sight of a woman in full men's clothing, with her hair down.

"Let's start again," she says.

"We know he is habitually about in the early hours of the morning, though this, of course, hardly narrows our search much. He strikes when the girls are tired, drunk, not particularly picky from whence comes their last pennies. At these hours, they're only scrounging for the last bit that will get them a bed. Now, could a labourer really work twelve to fourteen hour days, feed himself, stumble home to his family- could he really have time to form such fantasies, let alone enact them? No; hardly. So you meant to say, hmm?"

"No," she replies, with just enough crispness that he knows he has recited nearly word-for-word her unspoken diatribe.

"You won't catch him spinning vague descriptions which any number of men could fit."

"Why don't you leave the actual apprehension of criminals to me? It's not like you would know anything about justice."

"Ah, but how can you understand the mind of a criminal unless you interrogate one, sweetheart? Thoroughly?"

They share this sideways look.

It sends this little chill down her spine. He always holds her eyes for too long; if she didn't look away-

But she does look away.

He always stuffs his pockets with bits of carrot and apple before leaving their flat, so he can feed them to every horse not thoroughly invested in its nosebag, and stands for long minutes stroking their muzzles, and murmuring to them. "Come and give him a rub," he says to her, pressing his forehead to one placid old gelding who leans into the touch, and lips questioningly at Klaus' jacket.

"What did you write in this?" she asks, squinting at the notepad.

"That's for you to determine, isn't it?"

He moves away from the horse with a smile.

He tries to start all sorts of non-criminally motivated conversations with her. He wants to know everything: what does she like, what does she hope, what does she _dream_?

"I don't know," she says, taken off-guard. She doesn't; there is a gap for women like her, who, with no recourse for marriage and children, flounder in between. She has two friends; she isn't invited to balls. (Kol once rectified that by crashing the fourth Viscount Melbourne's latest gala and absconding with the hostess, to be faultlessly replaced by one Caroline Marie Forbes, who for ten minutes received a line of oblivious guests before a close acquaintance of the hostess uncovered the little scam, and had a constable fetched.)

She has clients. She has that.

"I like…gardening," she says, unexpectedly. "It's relaxing. I mean…I only know how to cultivate poisonous plants. Kol complains that he can't smell, eat or touch half the things in the apartment."

Halfway to the pawn shop, he makes her laugh. She doesn't mean to. You don't _enjoy_ men like this; you jail them.

But she laughs.

And three quarters of the way to the shop, she calls out, "The potato man!" and veers violently to one side, dragging Klaus after her, and into a circle of spectators who have ringed themselves around a middle-aged bald man.

"You're in for a treat today," the man calls out to the crowd. "I've some Yorkshire Reds, the hardest potato that grows. Three pence, ladies and gents, let's have three pence into the ring," he says, and into the ring clink clink clink the three pennies, and now the man's hand disappears to its wrist in his potato sack, and all the waiting spectators lean forward in bated anticipation.

"Kol once spent a pound on this man," she tells Klaus. "Just watching him throw potatoes over and over again. I entertained him for a whole twenty minutes, and didn't even need to set anything on fire."

The big hand comes out clutching its chosen potato, and then suddenly the man fires it skyward, up, up it hurtles, clearing the roofs of the houses, piercing somewhere the gathering clouds waiting with ominous certainty for the sun to slip up, you follow it as far as possible, pointing it out between industrial soot, and looming tenement, and meanwhile the man just folds his arms, and thrusts his head calmly forward.

He always catches it.

Gravity reasserts its dominance, the potato tumbles end over end, every eye roves over to this gleaming head, placid, staid, it's a forehead entirely unbothered by any human annoyance, you see in it the hazy flickering of men's hats, horse's tails, the endlessly winking winking puddles- but of the potato you see nothing, surely it's overshot him, surely he hasn't-

But he has.

The head tilts precisely. The arms stay folded. The eyes, unblinking, contemplate some inner trouble.

The potato explodes across his forehead.

The crowd cheers.

"Fourpence!" he roars out. "Let's see what I can do with fourpence!"

And into the ring tink tink the required admission.

She's clapping when she spots the man out of the corner of her eye.

Klaus is staring at her, and smiling. She suspects he has no idea what role the sack of potatoes plays in this man's performance; he may not have even noticed the stranger who now diverts her attention.

At the fringes of the crowd is this man, prowling: no spectator walks like this, alert to every turn of the stone beneath his boots, and blast of the cook steams against his back. Pedestrians are these numb unconcerned things; aimless, or, with their head down laboring toward this one specific goal that throbs somewhere in the city, beckoning them on.

He reaches for his pocket.

"Klaus-" she says, but not in time.

Two shots ring out.

Potato, man, crowd- they all go shrieking into distances that promise them some illusion of safety.

Klaus staggers against her.

The man fires once more; she feels Klaus shudder against her, and now they both pitch to the side.

He's too heavy to hold up; she tries. She grabs for the collar of his jacket instinctively, trying to press him into her, to keep him upright if swaying, but all his weight slumps into her from an awkward angle, and down they go, and she never knows why, but somehow, she comes up holding his cheeks when they land on the street.

He opens his eyes foggily.

"Klaus. _Klaus_ ," she says, sharply, like she cares.

There's this moment where they're staring at one another; she still has his face in her hands. He's lying half across her lap, blinking.

All the color has left him. He looks like…like his brother. Just for a moment, just long enough for her to see the same mother in their cheeks, and a different father in their brows.

She touches his stubble with her thumbs.

* * *

"Why aren't you bleeding?" Caroline demands, yanking open his coat.

The bullets have dumbfounded him; he flails after his breath as a man who finds himself abruptly in the sea. "The…vest," he gasps, and clutching at her arm he braces himself against her as the little hands touch his chest and the forehead is now furrowed with curiosity in place of her concern. "It's…bullet resistant."

She tilts her head, and the eyes roll heavenward. "Of course you would be prepared for some random to walk up and shoot you in the middle of the day while you're watching a man breaking potatoes over his head. You probably get that a lot, with your personality."

Sadly, future generations must forever write themselves his ingenious response; he chokes in trying to utter it, and has to lean into her as these little hands lift him with the strength of a man, and raising him to seated position, now begin to explore the layer beneath his jacket. "Silk?" she asks, a rhetorical muttering to which he is not required to reply. "This is actually…did you develop this? Just nod," she adds, with cautious exploration feeling over its seams, and dipping her fingertips into the indentations which his assassin has left in the fabric. " _Don't_ move," she snaps, and bolsters this command with an open-handed slap to the shoulder which he is most happy to observe jars him against her as she leans over to inspect what damage has been inflicted upon his person. "You've probably broken something. You may not be dead, but you were just shot three times with a .44."

"A fact which surely will be hastily remedied by your hitting me."

She looks down at him severely. "You're lucky I'm still here. I could have said, "Oh, nice, someone took care of it for me," and left you to die in the street. By the way, I didn't have time to see much of him; sorry. Just that he was about 5' 8", 145 pounds, brown-haired, hazel eyes…" She closes her own eyes for a moment, still clutching him, and now the brows gently mingle, the eyelids flicker, the face in this great transcendary clutch becomes suddenly ethereal, as if in her is some hand which has adjusted the wick of that inner lamp, and turning it up, suffused the whole being with deific luster. If there is any man who can regain his breath before such a sight, hale or infirm, let him try and present his findings; scientists will have need of such a Herculean triumph.

"Right-handed," she continues. "He very slightly favored his left side, but I don't think it was an injury; just an uneven gait. I'd say…31 or 32. He was recently in Spitalfields, within the last hour or two." She opens her eyes. "That's it."

"Your 'paltry' description notwithstanding, there are only a few candidates with the temerity to risk such an attack. And since you were standing beside me the entire time, and Bekah would have never left it to some impersonal third party, there's only one remaining suspect."

"It wouldn't be a certain ambitious second lieutenant whose initials are Colonel Sebastian Moran, would it?" she asks, and pulling his arm round her shoulders, helps him to his feet with hardly any appearance of strain. Perhaps Enzo has rendered himself mildly useful and seen to her physical conditioning.

He laughs and clutches for his ribs as he does so, noting their tenderness but nothing jagged; in the lungs is London's turgid smokes and nothing more; the blood he tastes wells merely from a bitten tongue. He touches it gingerly. "We'll need to work on your subtlety, love. You've been spending too much time with my brother."

* * *

There is a small sporting pub just off Whitechapel High Street which in its back rooms welcomes many a club meeting, and whose walls have in their recent pasts born witness to several a rather distinguished literary gathering. Today, they must content themselves with the criminal underworld's weary cast-offs, toasting their own triumph with that preemptive self-congratulations which can be found in all inferiors.

The guard he kills quietly, with the knife in his sleeve.

He enters with unassuming nonchalance, as any dead man should stroll once raised from his grave. To puff up one's feathers and enter with fanfare- no, no; rather, give them a moment to look, to look again, to whisper to themselves, to feel Premonition with wary exhale frost the bristling neck.

Moran has frozen mid-drink.

He smiles from the doorway at the four men seated round their table. "Please, continue," he says graciously. "You appear to be celebrating."

From an inner pocket he slips another knife, and rifling it into the hand Moran darts toward his own weapon, leaves him screaming in his chair; the man to his left he slams face first into the table, hard enough to break his nose.

The other two are slow, cumbersome, culled from the substandard stock round which Moran has been forced to root in search of a traitor. One gets his third knife; the other he kicks from his chair and shoots where he lies.

The man lying in the pool from his nose is lifted by the nape of his neck, and dispensed with a slash to the throat. What suggestions those lurid penny dreadfuls may have planted in your head are wholly inaccurate; no man of mortal strength touches his knife to the buttery neck of his victim, and slices it with a breakfaster's drowsy ease.

He meets Moran's eyes as he saws through the man's throat, working the blade roughly, and flinging blood across the glasses abandoned half-drunk, smiling as the man's struggles begin to abate, and the body's instinctive twitches to reign.

"Now, mate," he says, holding up the knife to the light, and for a moment admiring it. He backhands Moran across the face, sailing him out of his chair and into the wall. "This is how you murder someone."

* * *

Elijah is somewhat resistant to the sitting room's newest acquisition.

"No," he says coldly, upon entering the room and spotting Moran's head on the mantelpiece. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Niklaus. We've established very firm rules about severed heads in the house."

"I really think you're overreacting about this, brother. Just because of that one little incident with Bekah's second husband."

Elijah takes a bracing inhale. "No. Severed. Heads. In. The. House," he reiterates, and rings for one of the servants to carry it away.

No sense of showmanship, some people.

* * *

"Sure Wilkie Collins is the undisputed king, so. But Mrs. Braddon's had a fair swipe for the crown if you do be asking me," Tim says as they board one of the last omnibuses back to Baker Street, pulling his collar up round his chin to avoid those bits of wind which, carrying midnight already in their teeth, soften up a man for those fatal deeper hours.

"Not next to her," he says, and with a hand on his elbow turning Tim from the woman he has innocently directed himself toward, and drawing him instead into the private compartment. "She's a pickpocket."

"How can you tell?" Tim asks, looking with some betrayal at her demure gown, and the gloved hands folded with gentile refinement in the lap.

"You get to be able to spot them after enough times on one of these. That, and whatever her nice little dress may be desperately trying to project, no well-raised lady rides an omnibus unaccompanied at 11:30 in the evening. One of the hands in her lap is a false one, so she can sit there the very picture of irreproachable respectability, and grope about for unsuspecting purses with her free hand."

Tim transfers his wallet to an interior pocket of his jacket.

At Baker Street they scrape their boots on the railing, and tiptoe up the stairs past Mrs. Hudson's lair, from whence issues the dragon's low rumblings as it shifts on its cache of biscuits and Darjeeling, and through soft and satisfying dream chasing handsome tenants.

On the table has been deposited (amidst many other such detritus as Caroline never allows when she's home) a tray with only mildly stale biscuits, and a piece of folded notepaper.

"Hello; what's this?" he says, whisking off his jacket, and throwing it carelessly across the room, so that Tim may know where to place his own. "Caroline- come alone to Hyde Park, Knightsbridge side, 12:30. It's urgent." He flips it over; Tim leans across his shoulder to squint down at it. "No signature. That's rather ominous."

They exchange a look.

"I can't say we won't be horribly murdered, but shall we?"

Tim ponders this for a moment. "Sure it would be lovely not to have to report to the docks tomorrow morning."

They check their pockets for their pistols; Tim, being fresh from work, has only the one revolver, and a folding knife, rather insufficient for clandestine murder engagements, but that's easily remedied by any number of weapons he's stashed about the flat. "I've a smoke-rocket round here somewhere," he murmurs half to himself, upending the sofa cushions.

"A smoke-rocket?"

"Just your humdrum plumber's variety. I had a real bomb, but Caroline's touchy about explosives in the flat and made me get rid of it. Never take a woman as a roommate, Tim; they're very particular. Cramps your style, trust me. Ah; here we are," he exclaims, fishing out the rocket from beneath the sofa, and after a moment's triumphal posturing (it showcases his shoulders), tucking it into his vest.

* * *

Tonight a real pea-souper has got up; the cobblestones lie sick with jaundice underfoot, and challenge Tim for his traction, already in some difficulties thanks to the soles he's worn smooth on London's rougher alleyways. Somewhere a wind is moaning, but that doesn't concern the fog; not many worldly distresses concern a fog such as this. You could brandish a knife at it, and slice off not so much as a wisp. Having bricked off Cumberland gate behind them, and opening to every prowling thief these many side alleys by which rougher men make their way, it swallows their own legs to the knee, and with its best efforts tries to smudge out Tim's face, projecting nearly half a foot higher into the ether above them.

Hyde Park is during certain hours of the day bottlenecked with carriages along the north side of the Serpentine, ponderously ensuring this Season's hat is properly on display at a speed of Dead, Or Thereabouts; but at this hour the ladies have retired to their fires, and left the avenues to their dismal drownings.

It's precisely the sort of night on which Le Fanu would bump off his protagonist, but as he's far too handsome to worry about fate divesting itself of his facial structure, he keeps up a mild vigilance and nothing more; and anyway, they've linked arms upon leaving the flat and penetrating into this rather cunty night, and each has his hand on his gun.

At Knightsbridge a figure is hunched into himself, and has his face carefully slanted down, so the fog patters gently off his hat, and no gas light seeks underneath it; the man's of average height, broad-shouldered, and wearing an ulster, but if Caroline herself could make out anything else in this fog, he'll give his left testicle. (Well, not that one; it's his favourite. An Austrian count once gently slapped it.)

The man peeps out furtively from beneath his hat, and recoils; obviously a madman, to have reacted to the sight of his face in such a manner.

"You're not Caroline," he says, and steps away from the gate and a little farther into the alley, where his features begin to clear.

"Astute observation, darling. It's no wonder Scotland Yard constantly has to scrape and bow to a woman, if you're all so intellectually gifted."

Stefan Salvatore scowls at him from beneath the cap he now pulls lower over his eyebrows, as if in battening down his civilian dress, he might escape the disgrace of conversing with a sodomite in those obscene hours of night when everyone knows sodomy is most fervently commenced. (Assholes, darlings, are never as attractive by daylight.) "I need to speak with Caroline."

"I just so happen to live with her; I might be able to give her a message, in between soiling myself and talking to the wall, of course. I do have some small abilities; I've even dressed myself today."

Beside him, Tim is trying not to laugh. He isn't very good at it.

"I need to speak with _Caroline_ ," Stefan emphasizes. "I don't trust you."

"That's terribly hurtful." He hasn't let go of his pistol; you never know, after all, when you may have to shoot someone over a lapse in manners. Nik taught him that. "But you can talk to me, or you can piss off; it's your choice, darling. I happen to not trust men who arrange secret meetings in the dark with Caroline without even bothering to identify themselves beforehand. So: stalemate."

"It was too dangerous to identify myself in the note. I can't leave a trail."

"Good job you can just pass on your message to me, no paper trail required."

Stefan grabs his arm; he darts out his hand so swiftly that for a moment he nearly draws his pistol.

Tim does. "Don't touch him," he says, and with his free hand grasps Stefan by the wrist; quite bruisingly, it appears.

Stefan looks up at Tim in exasperation. "I'm a police officer. So you can shoot me, and go to Newgate, where you can take your chances on whether or not you'll get a fair trial as an Irish immigrant who's just murdered a Chief Inspector in cold blood."

"There's two of us, darling," he points out, and smiles just the way he's learned from Bekah, following a failure to remark upon her hair. "And it's awfully dark out here."

For a moment, Stefan waves his cock about, glaring up at them both, and then his arm is released, and Stefan shoves him backward; Tim, somewhat reluctantly, returns his revolver to his pocket.

"Tell Caroline I need to speak with her. Immediately. It's important. I'm not telling you any more than that," Stefan demands, and then abruptly turns his back on them both and strolls away down the avenue.

"What an arsehat," Tim says.

"A complete prat. Now, you'll want to run, darling; he's in a prickly enough mood that he may arrest us both for this," he replies, and, taking the smoke-rocket from his jacket, he pulls the caps, and tosses it at the back of Stefan's head.

* * *

Klaus is out all night, and returns early in the morning, cheerfully whistling.

She's arranging news clippings on the Whitechapel murders chronologically along the back wall; she's corrected all the erroneous 'facts' and crossed out the stupid sensationalism and to the margins added her own sprawling notations. Enzo is still sleeping, but with a start now jerks out of his dreams, as if sensing the presence of his nemesis. "I thought this shithole had just got a bit shittier. Touché, mate; you know how to make an entrance."

The smile instantly drops from Klaus' face.

He grabs at the blanket beneath Enzo and yanks it out from underneath him, nearly throwing Enzo onto the floor, and finding himself thwarted by Enzo's quicker hands, which grab the edge of the mattress and stop him just at that teetering moment between dignity and disgrace.

"In the year of our Lord 1888 He ascended from the ninth circle to rain fire and eight-year-old tantrums and it was terrible and the people were frightened. Seriously?"

The second she speaks, he's forgotten Enzo, he's forgotten the million waking breasts, taking their first startled lungfuls of September. For him London is this dim formless thing, somewhere beyond the window.

He smiles at her so she can't help but understand this.

Maybe somewhere, far buried, ancient, a thing in all humans that's been trained by its eons of genetics to stir, aching, and grope toward smiles such as these- maybe it squirms a little. Maybe for a moment she forgets he has blood on his shirt sleeve; she forgets, men come to him for the things they cannot stomach.

She tacks up her last clipping and she claps her hands and she says crisply to them both," Ok; time to get started for today."

* * *

But the rings are a dead end and the envelope with the two pills fruitless, and all through the day there trickles a steady stream of Baker Street Irregulars to report, "Noffink, ma'am".

She returns to a telegram from Kol.

**Come home. Possible news.**

She crumples it in her hand, as if from exasperation, and draws on this weary sigh she has always at the ready. "I need to go home for a bit. I think there might be an emergency."

Enzo immediately snaps to attention. "Is this an all hands on deck situation? I've only one revolver on me."

"No, this is a Kol-related emergency. The usual, I think. I need to do a damage assessment. You can both stay here. And remember: big boys do not need twenty-four hour nannies to ensure they get along and don't stab each other in the face. If there's any blood on the floor when I come back," she says, and leaving this as a complete statement, slips out the door.

* * *

When she enters the apartment, she finds Kol and Tim bent over a navigational chart which they have spread over the table, jostling for elbow space and dramatically gesticulating with their pencils.

They look familiar; they touch along the hips and the shoulders with this casual intimacy that makes her pause for just a moment in the doorway to calculate their exact tuxedo sizes: blue waistcoats, she thinks. White will wash out Tim's complexion.

Kol flips a hand at her and Tim tips his hat but they do not look up; Tim taps the end of his pencil emphatically at something on the chart. Kol gives him a judgemental look. There's a round of elbow pokings while they sound off a stream of gibberings about someone called Morehouse and another referred to as 'Flood'.

And then Tim says, "The sounding rod near the pump indicates they may have thought she was going down and panicked. But would Briggs risk his daughter in that wee bit of skiff over that amount of water in the hold?" and she conjures up the most dramatic sigh anyone in the history of this world has ever uttered, and she says, "Nope nope nope; not _another_ one. Do not encourage him."

"Caroline's only jealous because my theories are better than hers."

She makes her way to the armchair he's misplaced, pinching the bridge of her nose along the way. "The _Mary Celeste's_ crew was not eaten by a kraken, they did not cannibalize one another, and an unknown voodoo talisman did not possess the captain and prompt him to murder everyone on board before he sacrificed him to the Shark King as penance."

Kol squints down at the chart, then over at Tim. "All their foul weather gear and belongings were left behind; there was only minor damage done to the sails to indicate a former brush with rough seas, nothing that suggested the ship wasn't at every point of the voyage completely seaworthy." He rubs the dimple in his chin thoughtfully, and then straightens, with the most deadpan look on his face. "Naturally, we can draw only one conclusion from this: evil mermaids."

She clasps her hands in her lap and glares at him. "Everything has a logical, scientific explanation to it; sometimes we just haven't discovered it."

"Then what is it?"

She steeples her fingers underneath her nose. "Why would experienced seaman panic at a perfectly seaworthy boat, so badly that they left behind all their worldly possessions, including what they'd need to survive in a tiny lifeboat, with not even the foul weather gear they'd need to protect them in the terrible storm average people like to posit is surely what drove them from it in the first place? Either there was a terrible, instant emergency, or…"

"They expected to come back," Tim answers.

She nods just slightly at him, keeping her fingers together.

"Perhaps the mermaids agreed to negotiate in the beginning."

" _No_!" she says, and she tries not to laugh, but it breaks out of her anyway, forcing her to heave the little throw pillow that's been wedged down the side of the chair in his direction.

He catches it, of course, and bows.

"Anyway, it's better than that _J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement_."

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a load of piss," Tim says, and then, glancing over at her, "Sorry."

"It was published in _Cornhill_ , and still it's so firmly embedded itself into the lore I've seen some of the details sneak into 'historical' accounts. The gullibility of the public is truly unparalleled. The name of the ship isn't even correct."

"What's your news?" she cuts in. "And by the way? Don't think I didn't see that you put the couch back wrong."

"Tim bumped it."

"What? I did not," Tim insists, with a touch of panic in his voice.

"Messages are on the mantle," Kol tells her, throwing himself down onto the sofa, and hooking one of his legs casually over the arm.

"I saw. Apparently we need to review the rule about not stabbing the mail with a jackknife and leaving it embedded in the fireplace."

He does that oh-pish-tosh-I'm-too-handsome-to-care full bodied shrug with his arms out to either side, and leans his head back against the sofa arm. "I didn't want it to get lost. Anyway. Tim and I had a bit of an adventure last night."

"If this is a sex thing, I don't want to know," she points out, and exactly on cue, Tim turns the deepest shade of red every lone painter has ever struggled to channel from sunset into his brush.

" _Is_ it a sex thing?"

"Sadly, no. It's a Stefan Salvatore thing."

She sighs, heavily. "I have asked you and asked you to not antagonize him. He is my sole Scotland Yard contact who actually likes me, who _cooperates_ with me-"

"I don't trust him."

She cocks her head and gives him a little look. "You don't trust any police officer."

"I don't trust any self-righteous man. Any man who hasn't the audacity to own his sins commits the worst of them."

"Very philosophical. Anyway, exactly what has Stefan done now? Confiscated your opium? Reminded you that public sodomy is a charge Elijah can wriggle you out of only so many times?"

He extends a piece of folded paper to her, and, sitting up, watches her with unnerving steadiness as she peruses it for a moment and then, re-creasing it, taps it against her chin. "Stefan was waiting for us at Hyde Park, and he was quite reticent. He refused to tell me anything. He said he'd information for you alone and that he couldn't risk leaving a paper trail, nor could he pass a message through me. You're supposed to contact him unobtrusively."

She taps the paper once more, one measured _plap_ of its edge against her jaw. "And?"

Tim fidgets. He's leaned his hip against the table and crossed his arms over his chest, with the hat pulled a little lower over his eyes, so neither lash nor tell is visible.

She cuts him a sideways look.

Some take longer to break than others, but the steepled fingers, the long and unwavering skimming of the eyes over every facial tic- all of these combined unravel every client, enemy, pedestrian, if you can see down to all the faded dust of them, where they've swept things even they cannot remember, they'll yield up everything they have, always.

"We threw a smoke rocket at his head," Tim blurts out. "And...I pulled a gun on him."

Kol shrugs.

She pinches the bridge of her nose.

"Ok; here's what I'm going to do. Stefan is my friend. But because I love you more, I will graciously not kill you. You will return the couch to its rightful position. You will thoroughly clean off the table. You will fix the hole you've made in the mantle. You will _not_ ," she looks severely at them both, "consummate your obviously blossoming love anywhere other than Kol's room. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Tim says.

Kol grabs her arm as she stands to leave, and for a moment looks up with this sincerity she sees in him just rarely, just for her. "Be careful, Caroline."

* * *

"What sort of moral objection does your good Catholic soul have to stalking?" he asks Tim as soon as her footsteps have faded down the stairs, and across the foyer, where they are embraced at once by Baker Street's evening traffic. It wouldn't do to open this discussion while she's still in the house; she's exceptional hearing.

"Stefan?"

"Yes."

"Me good Catholic soul will manage just grand."

* * *

_In lesser stories, there is the tendency to introduce an integral element in the eleventh hour. The author, wracking his feeble brains to the last chapter, where he must at last bring his darlings to fruition, finds there the sharp vicissitude of the mediocre talent, who has spent all his genius in that enthusiastic gush of the beginning. With back to that unforgiving wall, then, with his deadline and his word count dwindling, he panics, he flails about: he plucks the first contrivance to spring to his mind, no matter how few pen strokes he has earlier devoted to it. And we his floundering audience are left marooned in our own confusion, staring about miserably at this morass we have blundered into, and wondering, is it for our own lack of cleverness, or his?_

_A word, therefore, fair reader, on Stefan Salvatore._

_Youngest son to Giuseppe Salvatore, a profitable Italian immigrant who, upon the loss of his wife, moved his two small sons to the rainy climes of England where he might bury his grief in that most welcoming bosom of unfamiliarity. Of the elder son little is known; a restless traveler, we may presume from passenger lists, and the holder of some small debts accrued over cards, and swiftly settled by his father._

_The Salvatores are of that common stock that neither sinks to man's lowest depths or ascends to his loftiest heights, but instead floats in between. No fair hand will grasp after their titles, but each brother has in his monthly allowance that privilege of the contentedly rich, who can marinate on his estate, and marry neither for love nor money if he so prefers, and instead devote himself to his fishing rod._

_Stefan Salvatore, then, is that rare breed of man who takes up his truncheon not in want of his daily bread, but in noble support of that concept man, if the papers are to be believed, buries ever deeper beneath his mosses with every trundling year: Justice, that first flickering seedling mankind snuffs when he has shed his plump swaddling days and finds himself thrown unceremoniously into bleak and breadless adulthood._

_His promotions are not ill-gotten, and so unworthy of mention; no, Salvatore has in his official records no ignoble strike against his good if foreign name. It is enough to say that in the fall of 1885 he made Chief Inspector and then subsided once more into the Metropolitan force with nary a ripple. Good men rarely stir those undulations which originate from no solo stone, chastely dropped into the rushes where the surface is already broken._

_It was soon after this appointment that his acquaintance with Caroline Forbes began, and put him onto that lucky trajectory which necessitates his appearance in these pages. Of romantic inclinations there is no particular proof; be they well-hidden or be his heart merely a larger recipient than that of his colleagues who shut their ranks against a simple woman, nevertheless, not once did Stefan begrudge Caroline her expertise, nor fail in the respectful usage of it whenever necessary. An unwatered bloom answers to any small droplet, be it poison or paradise: and so when Lestrade has thrown up his usual official barricade, it is to Stefan she turns, safe in his gracious conduct, and it is why at a dismal hour on the night of September 27, 1888, she goes alone to meet him in one of Spitalfield's dodgiest public houses and listens with bright and trusting eyes to his tale of whispered woe._

_There is one failing in Caroline Forbes. Though she casts a studious eye over every bare thread and ruffled hair, and in a moment's acquaintance has them neatly sussed down to the owner's rough childhood in Liverpool, she throws herself faithfully and whole-heartedly into that confidence only the religious, in his most comfortable hour, with God's creations shining all around him, can ever experience. She has never laid her heart at the feet of golden idols; but she has set it before every friend in all its raw and childlike wonder._

_And so, if one is close enough, and bends his ear hard enough, he can pick out in those furtive murmurings the salacious report of a police conspiracy arrayed against all the dastardly turns of Whitechapel, and the murderer who stalks them._

_He can see, if he has got the lay of her, and knows the turnings of her mind and loyalty, that she has no need to question this testimony, to check his fingernails, to lift up his boots, to note the nick on his inner shirt sleeve: so hath Friend spoken, and so hath his Word been inscribed._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bekah will be putting in an appearance; no worries. I just got distracted by Klaus murdering people and Kol and Tim seriously contemplating killing Stefan and dumping his body somewhere in the park.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Coming soon: Prostitute Enzo, Klaus tries to date Caroline by kidnapping a child, Kol being Kol, and, oh yeah, more mutilated corpses. We'll see Elijah and Rebekah at some point, too.
> 
> The intention is to dip into the middle of the canon, after the Sherlock/Watson dynamic has already been long established, but I will later touch somewhat on how Caroline's sidekick came to be the younger brother of her archnemesis. (Spoiler alert: because it makes Klaus' eye twitch a little.)
> 
> Also, can anyone venture a guess as to the identity of Klaus' fawning, overdramatic 'biographer'? lmao


End file.
